


Place at the End

by kalliel



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Adolescence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brother Feels, Childhood, Depression, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Series, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Series, Suicidal Dean, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-15
Updated: 2011-04-15
Packaged: 2018-04-08 15:39:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 27,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4310880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalliel/pseuds/kalliel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1996, you realized one thing: you're either a hunter or you're not; some bridges can only be crossed once.  Fast forward to 2021.  What happens when that frontier starts closing?</p><p>Post-series fic, AU from S6 (discounting 6x21 "Let it Bleed" and 6x22 "The Man Who Knew Too Much."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

♦ PART ONE ♦

Four o'clock was leaking into his clothes.

He knew Sam could feel it, too. Clammy sweat brushed up against his arm as Sam edged forward, and Sam's tennis shoes made sounds like he was walking on tacky gum.

"Thought Dad said it was supposed to be cool here," Dean said as he pushed Sam back. Edged him backward, making tacky gum noises all the while, until Sam's shadow melted below the outline of the Suburban. “After Arizona, he promised San Diego would be--”

"I think he meant in the _normal_ places," Sam hissed, "not _here_ here."

Brick four-story, gray asphalt. Some glass, dull in the shadow of the vehicle. Even the grass, wan and browning, slicked the cuffs of their jeans with the humid beads that sweated out of the leaves. Dean pulled at a thin plastic tube he'd wrapped around his waist in place of a belt. Just a tease at first, 'til it loosed up; then he whipped it out like a long, clear snake. Sam waited. He drummed his knees against his two-gallon can like a soccer ball; he was a regular one-man band, what with the beat, the _scrick scrick squelch_ of his tennis shoes, and the whining.

 Dean thought, _Vocals could use a little work, dude_ but said, "Dad said I could drive her if I could keep her running. So I'm gonna keep her running." Simple as swimming. "Coast clear?"

Sam mimed a restive 'yes.' Maybe a 'yes, but you're a jerk and I hate you.' But it's four o'clock in a crumbling backlot. City's dead.

"This isn't the first time we've done this."

Sam didn't reply.

Showtime.

Dean flipped the fuel door open, grease grinding into his fingers as he unscrewed the cap, had the tube snaking into the tank in seconds. Sam joined in then, jumped to unwind the tube from Dean's leg, tried to blow off as much of the dust and gravel sand from the lip as he could. Not that it mattered--Dean smeared the tube grease-black when he took it, made a disgusted face before kissing plastic. He blew. 

Nothing.

Shoved it further.

Blew again. Bubbles, like dinosaur tar. You couldn't hear them, really, but the humming vibration was there. He coughed. "Sammy--"

Sam waved him off. He was already standing, back flat against the building, neck craned to peer around the corner. Ever vigilant Sammy.

Time to get to work. Dean sucked as hard as he could. He could feel resistance on the other end, but not much else. _Take a breath and it's all over._ Nothing. Nothing. 

The lot was silent, except for Sam's shoes. Like sucking on the damn tube was creating a vacuum in space. (Still nothing. Nothing. An eternity in five seconds.)

Then: "Uh, Dean?" The jangle of dog tags. _Dad?_ Skittering gravel. It didn't sound like Dad, not really--not at all--but it's the only thing Dean has room to think, outside of _keep sucking_ , and it takes him a split second to shuck the thought and jump to the alternative. Panic. “Dean!”

Sam jumped away from the brick wall, followed by an explosion of black. Loud black. It registered as 'fuck' before anything else. 'Fuck' that broke into reciprocal sputtering panic, as the gas leapt up the tube and into Dean's mouth, unmonitored. Gas spilled onto his shirt when he dropped the tube, spilled into his hands, his jeans--everywhere--until the tube hit the ground, curled like a snake, and started dribbling into the gravel. 

Loud black slammed into Dean's chest, knocking him back so hard his head bounced against the gravel (and the scrap, and the glass, _fuck_ ). Dead weight pawing at his chest, parading up his ribcage. He tasted gasoline.

Big black dog. Loud black was a big black dog. A thousand things flashed through Dean's mind, most of them sigils, calibers, even _herbs_ \--all useless. But his first instinct was to kill. Kill the instant he can fucking figure out how not to get tenderized in the process. Dog must've done the same mental number on Sam, because in his peripheral vision Dean saw a switchblade fall tidily from Sam's sleeve to his hand, dull in the shadows like the glass that cracked beneath his feet. Then Dean remembered the tags. "Wait--"

Real dog. It's a real dog. Someone's dog. Tongue lolling out and dripping thick, hot slobber onto his neck. Real dog.

Sam saw, too. He threw Dean the knife anyway, just in case. Dean wasn't sure if it was the actual crushing weight on his chest, or the shame of paranoia, but his exhalation popped and shuddered, and... _whatever_ cooled in the pit of his stomach. It all tasted like gasoline.

Dean tried to breathe in, which only partly worked. Sam had scrambled around to the gas tube and was brandishing it like a fire hose. The gas dribbled out. The dog didn't pay it much mind, but its ears perked at Sam's shaky _Go on, git!_. 

The dog turned. Sam flashed it with a faceful of gasoline and it recoiled, bounded from Dean's chest like it was made of claws and watch springs.

Dean didn't move, just let the clouds slide just let the clouds slide over the cut of the tall brick building above him. _Domestic_ dogs! He rolled onto his hands and knees, curled against the front tire of the Suburban, his back to Sam.

"Dean, are you okay? You're bleeding. Are you okay?"

Dean's fingers came away from the back of his head red and sticky. Huh. He'd forgotten about that. "Yeah, I'm fine." It was clotting already, more of a mess that was going to be hell to explain than anything else. The claw marks on his chest were superficial beneath his layers of clothing, though the heat made the ripped skin bloat and sting. He tried to spit out the taste of gasoline.

 "We should get out of here." Which was a given, but Sam meant now. As in, immediately, this very second, five minutes ago if possible. Sam came around to Dean's front and peered over the hood of the Suburban. He had that antsy look of rule-abiding concern on his face.

"Good plan." But he wasn't moving fast enough, apparently, because Sam had jumped up, had the drum capped and the tube, gas still flicking out the end, pulled out of the gas tank and coiled neatly around his hand before Dean had even turned around.

Dean shut the fuel door. "I can carry that."

Sam adjusted his grip on the container. "No." He broke into a shambling jog, drum banging against his thigh with every other step. After he flashed one last look at the drained Suburban, wet gravel dark in its shadow, Dean followed.

It was a block, block and a half of narrow side streets to the Impala. They jumped in, gas can at Sam's feet.

"We'll deal with that later."

Dean pressed his forehead to the steering wheel and drew in a series of measured breaths. The taste of gasoline was still thick in his mouth, the smell of it saturating his skin and clothes. He felt a little like being sick.

 "Are you okay?" Sam asked again.

"Don't light any matches," said Dean. "This is a strictly non-smoking ride."

\--

It took Sam all of twenty minutes to surface out of deep brotherly (unwanted) concern. Instead, he welcomed the slippery medium between keeping tabs on Dean’s well-being while really kind of wanting to murder his idiot of a brother himself.

“We need to find Dad. He’ll tell us what he needs us to do.”

See, this was the kind of thing that really irked Sam. Sam tried not to gag on the smell of gasoline bleeding into the air in the car. “If he needed us to do anything, he wouldn’t have left us in Arizona.” He wouldn’t have zipped off in a _respectfully borrowed_ Toyota and put a handful of days and hundreds of miles between them. After Arizona--boiling days filled with orders, training, vigilance, orders, orders, and more orders--Sam didn't see why a speedy reunion was topping Dean's wish list. This wasn’t even a difference in opinion, or affection--Dean’s wants were actual logical fallacies at this point.

“He trusts us to do it on our own,” Dean said, as though that explained everything.

“He left us to clean up his mess!” How trust factored into leaving your sons with a pile of dead dogs, a shovel and a stretch of bushy desert, Sam was pretty sure he’d never understand, even if one day someone bothered to explain.

But Dean slammed his palms against the steering wheel, floored the gas. Then, low and deadly quiet--

“He left us there to finish the job.” And that was that. 

Sam sulked against the passenger window. Let Dean believe whatever he wanted. _Sam_ wasn’t going to pick up the pieces.

Their new haste took them fifteen feet and about fifteen inches from the back bumper of a much larger vehicle. Red light. So they continued, stop go stop go, for some eternal stretch of time Sam tried to measure by the buildings and blocks and building blocks they passed. Vertical dips, raw street, and light after corner after light. The odometer crept forward; Sam wet his lips sleepily, lulled by the rocking jerk of traffic, and the gasoline needle drooped and flagged, and with it, so did Dean.

“I hate cities.” They rattled over another jagged patch of street before sliding to a halt, again too close to the car in front of them. Three inches.

Dean gulped in air, loud enough that it snapped Sam out of his baked torpor. Sam’s nostrils flared, dry and brittle with the heat, mucked up with exhaust and gasoline and the thick stench of wet concrete; they rolled past grocers and body shops and thrift stores and wedding boutiques and drug stores and bail bond buildings, all pouring water on the cement, trying unsuccessfully to keep the dust down.

“You’re going to crash,” Sam pointed out, when Dean braked so close to the leading car even whispers couldn’t pass between them. 

“I’ll show you crashing.” At that, Dean accelerated wildly backwards, just shy of the terrified Lotus Esprit behind them, crossed double yellow, and all but threw them across oncoming traffic towards the gas station on the corner.

“Dean!” Sam squealed, hitting a pitch he didn’t think he’d been able to reach since he was seven. He grabbed frantically at the keys--what he would do, he didn’t know; wrench them from the ignition?--but Dean smacked his hand away. Eased against the curb and parked.

Sam was most of the way through an invective against Dean ever driving them again by the time Dean got the door open and spilled out of the front seat. “I need some air.”

Sam watched Dean disappear into the gas station, ghost-like. He managed a few uncomfortable minutes in the Impala, legs crossed over their contraband-filled tin (why’d Dean have to pick a _gas station_ of all places?), before he leapt out, a popcorn kernel in oil, and scampered to the pay phone just outside the station.

Sam dialed Dad’s Motorola on a whim and, to his astonishment, found himself actually talking to Dad in the space of a minute. Or being talked at by Dad. There was a woman named Veronica; with a kid about Dean’s age. An apartment that should be easy to locate provided all the signs were there. Place at the end of the block. A case. And he’d meet them at seven. He ignored Sam’s interrogation, who what when where why.

Typical.

“You make it alright?”

“Obviously.”

“Where’s Dean?”

“I dunno.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.”

“Maybe you’ll find out at seven, Dad.” Sam hung up.

Dean returned momentarily, jackets in hand, white t-shirt bare to the world. It wasn’t strictly white, never had been, but now Sam could see streaked muddy paw prints, easily discernible if you knew what you were supposed to be looking for. Dean wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, lips curling in distaste. He looked flushed, wavering mirage-like and overtired. Pressed a hand to his abdomen, across invisible damage.

As they returned to the traffic gridlock--slower now, resignedly sluggish--Sam relayed Dad’s less than exuberant welcome. Veronica. Apartment. Seven o’clock.

“That’s it?” Dean said, when Sam had finished. “I mean. ‘If all the signs are there’--what is that even supposed to mean? And who the hell is Veronica? ‘Friend of Mom’s’, really?”

“No, he also said he had a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates waiting for us when we got there because, god, he missed us so much. C’mon, Dean.” Sam sulked against the passenger window.

“You’re kind of a bitch in your old age, Sammy.”

“And you’re a jerk.”

Dean changed tunes. “Who the hell is Veronica?”

Sam sighed, exasperation running through him like the heat and hunger. “How ‘bout you ask Dad, huh? You never ask Dad. If you’re so curious, how come you never bug Dad about it, huh?”

“Did he answer?” 

They lapsed into silence as they drove, conversation supplanted by brick and tall concrete and colorful billboards promising everything and more. Then, at yet another stoplight, traffic like a funeral procession in the tranquilizing heat, Dean started in again.

“But I mean--you don't think that's kind of...weird? That Veronica woman, and--'friend of Mom's,' really? Like hell Mom was friends with any chicks living in California. And like hell any of 'em would be all buddy-buddy with dad."

"Well, why not? I mean, he was her hus--"

"Trust me, that's really not how that worked."

Sam cut off his next comment, and raked his lower lip with his teeth. He didn't have anything to say to that.

"C'mon, let's just check out the place. It's probably pretty ace. 'If all the signs are there.' We are living West Side Story, dude."

"That took place in New York."

"We are way the hell more west than New York could ever dream of being."

\--

As it turned out, all the signs really weren't quite there. But it was easy enough to find the building, even in the nest of identical concrete high-rises. The apartment itself was a different story, eight floors up and about a million snaking corridors away. 

"Who the hell numbers things out of order, anyway?" Dean panted. He adjusted the green duffel on his shoulder. The weapons inside hadn't been packed correctly, and handles and barrels and god knew what else were biting into his spine. He leaned back against the wall. It was unpleasantly warm, far from the cool stone he'd hoped for.

"You're probably gonna tell me to fuck off for asking, but--are you--"

Dean groaned. "For the last time, _yes_."

"You look like you're going to throw up."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Yeah, and I feel like it, too. Let's just find the apartment."

Something flickered in Sam's expression. "I can carry--"

"Let's just find the apartment."

It was around the next corner, down a connecting hallway. 

Sam tried the doorknob. When it didn’t budge, Sam swore up and down Dad hadn’t said what to do about keys. Luckily, it didn't seem like this building was going to have any sort of fancy electronic alarm system rigged up to its apartments, so they were good on that one. 

"Gimme the thing," Sam said absently, examining the lock like he could see through the brassy exterior and work out the insides beforehand.

Balancing the duffel between the wall and his body, Dean leaned into it and worked the lockpick out of his back pocket. "Time ya," he said.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Right." And he went to work. Sam got the lock-and-bolt combo down to under five, which in a childhood of waiting, and waiting more, was lightning. But Dean had been nauseous beforehand, ever since their little run-in with the dog from hell, and the feeling sure as hell hadn't improved, even after their little QueasyMart pit stop. Watching the door finally creak inward, the relatively cool darkness of the interior was a welcome sight.

Dean pushed past Sam, who was still kind of beaming at the doorknob, and gave the living room a cursory once-over. There weren’t any windows--no grand view of the city to make up for the eight flights of stairs--and it was dark as hell inside. But Dad would like it like that. If they were on a case, then they were in for days upon weeks upon months of salt, sigils, the whole shebang. No windows meant one less weakness.

 "We should go to prison."

Sam’s forehead wrinkled, and he looked up at him like he was going to say something.

“No windows,” Dean explained blithely. “You know.”

Sam gave him a look that said no, he didn’t know, but he folded his words back into his cheeks, lips pursed. He blew out an exasperated sigh instead. 

Dean continued his examination: a small kitchen, with a fridge and a sink and a counter top that overlooked the living room like a wet bar. Hallway leading down to what was probably the bathroom and bedroom. Lumpy carpet with streaked stains across it, dull and grey like they'd been scrubbed at by some hapless cleaner hoping to trade effort for success. Dean sneezed, dust billowing up with each footstep. Yeah, didn’t work like that.

"Home sweet home," Dean pronounced.

Sam poked his head in, though he didn’t seem that thrilled by what he saw. "Should we go down and get the sleeping bags?" 

Probably should have just brought them up with the rest of the stuff. The idea of having to trek all the way back to the car wasn't exactly the most exciting prospect. Dean peered into the kitchen. Dust curled around the feet of all the counters, but it wasn't so bad. 

Dean dropped the green duffel under the bar counter and slid down the wall. He sat against it, back flat, and tried not to think about throwing up again. It really wasn’t that bad; he’d probably be fine in a few hours, but he hated the feeling like no other. Even then, it wasn’t like Caleb hadn't warned him against the possibility of fucking up the siphoning: _Don't throw up, kid. You don't want to bring all that shit up. And you definitely don't want it in your lungs._

Probably a little late for that. Dean felt what must be gas and gasoline bubble up in his throat, pop as it reached his mouth. He breathed out.

Fucking fantastic.

Well. At least they'd gotten some gas. Not a lot, since they'd wasted most of it on the ground, and on that dog, but it was a start. It was probably better this way. Then Dad wouldn't think to ask where they'd suddenly gotten a full tank from. Dean wasn't sure why he felt like Dad would be so against the idea of his boys stealing. It's not like he didn’t have them do ten million other illegal things. Not like like he wasn't running half the credit card scams in the country, on top of twelve other different types of identity fraud, libel, and whatever the hell else. But Dean just got the impression that Dad wouldn't want him to be stealing shit out of other people's cars. Hypocrite.

"I can go down and get them." Sam slid down the wall beside the door on the opposite side of the room. It was dark inside, like Dean had expected, the only light coming through the uneven sliver at the base of the front door. It had been hotter than hell in that parking lot, but Dad was right. It was pretty cool in San Diego. Though maybe that had more to do with spending half the year in southern Texas and Arizona just before. Dean was pretty sure the Sahara would feel pretty damn cool after running around Texas all August.

"What?"

"I said I could go down and get them. The sleeping bags."

"Leave 'em. We don't know what Dad's gonna want to do tonight, anyway. Maybe he'll want an early start."

"Then we should sleep now."

Dean snorted. "Uh huh. Have you ever tried sleeping at five in the afternoon? It doesn't work that way."

Sam clearly disagreed. "Well, do you want to lie down?"

Dean considered this. "No, not really." And he really didn't. He just wanted to get the fuck over it, stop belching gas, and pretend it all hadn't happened. But he should probably try to get cleaned up anyway. The back of his head was starting to itch, his hair sticky with congealed blood and dirt and god knew what else.

"Do we have any clean clothes?"

"I don't think so. I'm pretty sure we skipped the laundromat when we were in Julian."

Well, that's fantastic. Whatever. "I'm gonna go test out the shower. See if we've got running water in here or not. Try to figure out what to do about--yeah." He wiped his face again, this time with the palms of his hands. Bad idea. The grease was so thick on his fingers he could almost feel the weight.

"Gasoline, that's--is that poisonous? That's poisonous, right?" Sam asked, finally.

Dean shrugged. "Not gonna be making mixed drinks out of it any time soon. Caleb's gonna get a riot out of this one he ever finds out, though."

"Caleb gets a riot out of hit and runs," Sam deadpanned.

Dean shrugged again, then got up. "Face it, Sam. I don't care what the hell the PETA says. That pig--javelina-- _thing_ \-- deserved it."

 

\--

 

Sam waited until he heard the water running before he left the apartment. As long as Dean wasn’t draped over their new toilet, puking his guts out, Sam had done his part. He snaked the keys to the Impala from Dean's pile of clothes crumpled outside the bathroom door--everything smelled like gasoline--and tried to navigate his way back to ground floor and around to the alley where they'd left the car.

The return trip was unexpectedly quicker than their first. Sam dragged assorted trash bags dragged from the backseat and threw them into the Dumpster at the side of the building. The sleeping bags and dirty laundry, he piled up strategically so he could take it all in one trip. Even so, by the time he'd reached the apartment, he couldn't feel his fingertips anymore. He was pretty sure they'd just been cut off by the sheer weight and awkward bulk of all his bags.

Sam wasn't even really sure why they were bringing everything up. Dad hadn't given them any indication of how long they'd be staying. The apartment outperformed the Winchester standard, though it wasn't much bigger than their motel rooms. So this must be a pretty big case. Either that or--no, that couldn't possibly be it. It had to be a pretty big case. And it wasn't like they were putting down a mortgage, didn't even seem like they were going to be paying rent. At least, not in the normal sense. Sam tried not to think about that kind of thing too hard--not when Dad wasn't around to wear down to one word factoids and maybe-answers.

By the time Sam kicked the door shut behind him, dropping everything in his arms so that it cascaded all around the living room like presents falling from Santa's (run-down, illegally parked) sleigh, Dean was out of the shower, more or less. He'd apparently discovered too late they didn't actually own any towels. Evidently he'd found some way to dry off, because he came back down the hallway, squirming in now-damp jeans, shirtless.

"Where the hell are we even supposed to find towels," Dean muttered. He tried to pull his jeans back up past his hips. "See, this is why the hotel dig is so much better. Free towels, maid service, those little soaps and shampoo bottles. Love those." 

Washed up, Dean didn't look much better than he had before, though he was less sweaty, had slightly less blood in his hair. The grease was still there, muted but still shiny across his face and hands. No soap either, apparently. His chest was a budding purple with wide, puffy scratches where the dog had raked him, but nothing that broke the skin. They'd been pretty lucky. They hadn't killed anyone's pet--which was always a plus--and Sam's read enough newspapers to know that normal or no, plenty of people have been mauled by a plain old dog and gotten off far worse than anything their family's ever been put through fighting monsters.

"Are you hungry?" Sam asked. Not that they had anything to eat. They'd have to go out. And if they went out, they'd miss Dad. Sam was already working out this logic in his head when Dean said _No_.

Which was too obvious a lie to even bother countering. But Sam knew as well as Dean did that until Dad walked through that door, they weren't going anywhere.

Sam knew that Dean preferred when Dad was there. When they were all there. Sam wasn't entirely sure why, since it seemed like most of that time, Dean was either receiving orders or being reprimanded for not following them. Dad left, and it was all freedom. (It wasn't. It would never be. But it was better than--well.)

That February in Arizona, they'd all tracked down a pack of Black Dogs together. Three full months, straight into April. Sam had been the one to kill them in the end, and Dad was proud. Dean was sore, jealous even, but also proud. Sam had just said, "Can we go home now?"

Bad words and worse wording.

"This place has a phone," Dean said. He was inspecting the kitchen more closely, opening all the drawers and cupboards. The phone wasn't in either of these, but it was hidden around the corner, in a claustrophobic alcove that held an empty pantry and a brown plastic garbage can, no liner. "Think it's hooked up?"

Dean picked it up and held it to his ear. Dial tone. "We're moving up in the world, Sammy." He smirked, and adjusted his pants again. "You gonna take one?"

It took Sam a moment to realize Dean was talking about a shower. He looked at his watch. 6:45. He scratched his head. His hair felt heat-limp and grainy. "Dad's probably gonna be here soon," he said.

Dean knocked on the wall adjoining the kitchen and the hallway. What he thought he was listening for, Sam didn't know. "Yeah, probably." He didn't make any move to dress further, though.

They both knew Dad wasn't coming any time soon. It was like he couldn't break tradition. Seven o'clock meant ten if it didn't mean next week.

"So you really don't think there's anything going on between--" Dean started, peering into the oven and very pointedly not looking at Sam.

"What?" Sam said. That was kind of out of the blue. "What, Dad and that woman? Veronica?" 

Dean shrugged. "No, the other woman. Christ, Sam."

"Well, I don't know, Dean. He said it was a case. And if she was a friend of Mom's, maybe she knew about Dad, about hunting. Afterward."

Dean kicked at the cupboards with his bare feet. Wet and still clammy, the dust hiding underneath clung to his toes, turned a moppish shade of wilted gray, leaving dark streaks against his skin.

Then the telephone rang. They both jumped, and Sam's heart raced up to panic and back down in the split second it took him to realize what the sound was. Dean looked at Sam, then moved to answer. "'Lo?"

"Is this a Winchester?"

"It depends on who's asking," said Dean. Sam would have to tell him later that saying that made it seem like two things: one, he was some kind of cartoon, and two, it very definitely was a Winchester on the line. Sam got up, jumped over to Dean's shoulder, and they set the receiver between both their ears. It was a girl's voice on the other end.

"My mama said to tell you to come down to the street. The one in front of the building across from that grocery store with the pink roof. My mama and your dad are coming over to pick you up. You're coming over for dinner."

"Okay," Dean said. He mouthed _I told you so!_ and punched Sam in the arm. Unnecessarily, Sam thought.

"Oh and, which one are you? Are you Sam, or--"

"This is Dean."

"Oh, okay. You're in my school. I think I'm supposed to show you around or something. It's not that interesting, though; I dunno what I'm supposed to be showing you or anything."

"Right. Well. I guess we'll see you at dinner."

This time it was Sam's turn to punch his brother. Some phone manners he had. "At least say thanks for the message!" he hissed.

Dean shrugged. Apparently it was that kind of day. The girl on the other end hung up and Dean followed suit. "I _told_ you so," he said again. "Dad is totally banging that chick."

"Right. Because they've had so much time to get to know each other. They just sat in this living room and had tea."

Dean shrugged. “Plenty of room."

"Shut up."

"Hey, man, that one was totally on you. You left yourself wide open for that and you know it."

Dean picked up the green duffel and threw it in the closet at the end of the hallway. Already inside was an ancient hose vacuum and a yellowing ironing board. "Guess that's what they mean when they say partially furnished," Dean breathed. It smelled like moth balls. It smelled like an entire nest of breeding moth balls. "Got, you know, all the essentials."

They made it downstairs in pretty good time. Either the shower had helped Dean along a lot or had just given him the chance to hide it better, but he wasn’t looking nearly as sick as before. He hadn't done a particularly good job of washing out his hair in the back, where the dog had jounced him in the parking lot, but if you weren't looking too close, it wasn't so bad. They took the stairs two at a time down all eight floors.

Dad and Veronica weren't downstairs yet. And there wasn't really anywhere good to sit and wait; the curb was gum-encrusted, the gutter choked with classifieds and plastic straws. "You wanna check out what they have over there?" Sam asked, pointing to the store the girl on the phone had described--the one with the pink roof.

"Hell, why not," said Dean. "Figure we're probably going to be MVP here over the next few months. Might as well case the joint."

"You really think we'll be here that long?" said Sam. He wasn't sure if he actually _wanted_ to be here that long, though it was probably too early to tell. It's just that so far their experience hadn't exactly been love at first sight material. 

Dean laughed. "I'm telling you, he's banging Veronica. We could be here for the rest of our lives."

"You sound like you're the one doing the... banging," Sam muttered accusatorily. "Seriously, Dean."

"Yup. Dad's banging the chick, we'll move in, and we'll be running away from that black fucking dog for the rest of our lives."

They crossed the street. It was a small store--Denis's, proclaimed the sign. It smelled like bread inside. -Warm, in a sun-baked, stuffy kind of way. You could see the condensation precipitating on the insides of the display windows. Giant cookies, fifty cents. Bread loaves stacked in threes, one dollar. There were sandwich rolls and doughnuts, cookies--even cheesecakes. There was a sign for meat cuts behind the cash register--vacant--and shelf upon shelf of every chip or snack you could imagine. There were jars of things, the names of which Sam was pretty sure he couldn't pronounce right, and handwritten signs pricing everything out. NO CREDIT CARD said one of the signs at the front, in bold blue marker. NO was underlined in red. CASH AND FOOD STAMP ONLY.

"Well, that could be a problem," Dean whispered. "We're gonna have to score some actual cash somewhere." Which wasn't the problem, exactly. Dean had gotten pretty good at darts while they were in Arizona, once he figured out it was a lot easier to school passing strangers at darts than it was to continuously hustle the same one pool table, or the same one game of poker every week. _All about the timing,_ Dean had claimed, the last time he'd come home less than pristine. _And the lighting._

No one had yet bothered to meet them at the front desk, though Sam could hear the radio going and conversation in the back room. A woman was yelling at someone named Alonso. Alonso either wasn't saying anything in retaliation, or the woman was on the phone. Dean drummed his fingers on the front desk, the hard plastic case showing off still more breads and cookies. When still no one came, he moved towards the door, where there was a display of candies and energy bars. Some of it was slipped into pockets, tucked between waistbands. A small pack of mints somehow ended up under Dean's tongue.

Sam watched the counter.

Dean was reaching for the screen door handle when the yelling stopped and a woman finally came out to greet them. Sam wondered if she was Denis. Dean gave her a close-lipped smile and something that was a cross between a wave and a salute, and turned to leave. Sam waved, too, and skittered out of the store behind him.

Once outside and safely across the street, Dean spit out the container of mints and took about half the pack in one gulp. "What's taking them?" he said absently, mouth full. He leaned against the building--Sam guessed it was _their_ building, at least for now. They didn't say anything more about Denis's.

Dean had finished most of his mints when Dad and Veronica pulled up. The crunching was quieter, at least, and Dean had stopped talking about how these were the kind of mints that made sparks in your mouth when you chewed them in the dark.

"Good, Graciela got a hold of you, then," Veronica said in greeting. She was dark, thickly muscular, and short, seat pushed up to the wheel the way Dad hated. She looked more like a drill sergeant than a mother. She didn’t smile.

"Yup," said Dean, eventually. 

“Wow, you’re cool,” Sam muttered as he and Dean scrambled into the backseat. It had a gray fuzzy cover over the seats that reminded Sam unpleasantly of sitting on some kind of blanket made out of stuffed animals. And it had to be a pretty good approximation, since it had been a long time since Sam had ever even seen a stuffed animal.

Sam tried to memorize the road to Veronica's house from the apartment. West a ways, more towards the coast. Up hills. Then all along a plateau neighborhood, flat and full of nondescript project houses. Veronica pulled up in front of a small yellow house with a slatted front and a steel fence that corralled a few large, thorny rosebushes. They were the kind of rose bushes with more thorns than flowers, but they were bulky and green. The grass was thick, yellow, and long.

They walked up to the front door, up a concrete path that had a set of small handprints pressed into it: GC 1983. Sam jumped the one concrete step. 

Veronica let the screen door swing out, which gave Sam just enough clearance to avoid being smacked off the front step, and unlocked the door. She called a greeting to Graciela.

Inside, Sam wasn't sure what to think about the house. It was small, but it was full to the brim with photographs and ceramic statues--only some of which looked like they served some sort of occult or protective purpose--embroidered pillows, rag rugs and mismatched furniture. Sam thought about their own empty apartment and it made him feel sort of sad that their idea of unpacking the apartment involved dropping some sleeping bags in the back room, locking guns in the closet, and discovering the telephone. _That_ was home. Actually, it was better than home, because otherwise they were on the road, four steel walls closing in a hot space that left room for nothing but secrets.

Just then, a girl's head popped out from around the corner, flooded Sam out of his own thoughts with her presence. She was short and dark like her mother, but round where her mother was hard. She wore a bright cross around her neck.

"Mama, the beans aren't cooking evenly," she said in greeting.

They all followed Veronica into the too-small kitchen. Sam ended up squeezed up against the girl, having tried hard not to get too close and failing miserably. 

"I'm Graciela,” she announced as a matter-of-fact. “Which one are you?"

"I'm Sam," said Sam. And he couldn’t help it; he could taste the trained paranoia on his lips, but he had to ask. "How do you know who we are?"

"My mama told me about you two. She said you were John Winchester's kids."

 _And who did she say John Winchester was?_ Sam wanted to ask. But Dad had ears like a wolf's whenever it was least convenient for Sam, so he didn't want to risk it. They had enough ‘Family Discussion’ material to last a lifetime as it was. He was pretty sure the stunt with the car, and the dog, and the visible fallout, hadn’t even had its turn.

Sam heard the jingle of dog tags.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me," Dean breathed. "You've got to be fucking--"

"We don't use that language," said Dad, though Sam wasn’t entirely sure how long that rule had been around. Best guess, about twelve seconds.

Sam followed Dean's line of sight out to another screen door leading to a small patio and grass patch off the kitchen area. Outside, nose to the screen, tongue coating the mesh with a film of saliva, was the black dog. Tall and bulky and slick with a sheen of rainbowy oil was the black dog. Sam struggled against the shudder that threatened to coil down his spine.

"She, uh. She yours?" Dean asked Graciela, edging back out towards the living room, away from the door.

Graciela shook her head. "That's Papi's Dog."

"She got a name?"

"Papi's Dog. That's her name. She's Papi's Dog."

"Right. And uh. I don't suppose she got out earlier today?"

Graciela shrugged as best she could, though with Sam still leaned up against her, her movement was a little truncated. "I don't know what she does. She does whatever she wants. She's not our dog."

"But Papi--he must live here too then, right?"

" _My_ Papi. My dad. And he doesn't live here anymore."

Even Dean knew it was better not to ask. “So, what’s for dinner?” he said instead.

“Humba and lumpia. Leftover tamales from the freezer,” said Graciela.

Dean looked to Sam for translation, and Sam to Dean. Then they shrugged. Better not to ask.

_♦ dame a mi la muerte, porque lo he seguido silencios como una sombra y estoy cansado ♦_

“And you’re sure he didn’t come back?” Dean glanced down at his list. Last name on a sheet of ink smears and torn edges, binding frayed where he’d torn it from Dad’s old journal. “Haven’t seen ‘im since Thursday,” the voice on the other end of the line confirmed dryly. “In 2011. A goddamn decade and you’d think people’d have figured out the fucker bit it. Shit.” Dial tone.

Dean blotted out Roy Spinelli, just above Walt Kroger, Heather Mirabell and Graciela Caceres. His was the last name on a long list of numbers that had coffins on the other side.

“Fuck.”

Dean kneaded his forehead vigorously, or as much as his shoulder would allow. Chose a damn good time to be acting up again. But maybe he could give Clive Beachamp a try. Guy wasn’t a hunter, but he had a network the size of Sprint on his side. A little toggling and his number popped up, labeled ‘Asshole.’

Dean shifted uncomfortably on the wooden steps to the sound of buttons pressing. Automatic speed dial. Life had to be pretty fucking sad if Clive Beachamp was actually one of his Fast Five or whatever. Sad, but mostly just _over_ for a hell of a lot of better people.

The phone rang and rang and never picked up. The number you have dialed is not available.

Make that Fast Four.

Dean shifted again. He felt like he had splinters up his ass the size of the step they came from. This house had certainly seen better afternoons.

Maybe Arnold Belzer. Belzer was in the know; maybe he’d cut him a deal. Why was it so hard to score? All he needed were some iron rounds. But no sooner had someone picked up--a woman, sultry Carolina accent, decidedly not Belzer--did Sam roll up in a jalopy so nondescript and hybridized with other junked parts, that even Dean couldn’t identify the original make.

“And thank you, ma’am, for your cooperation. We’ll be sure to keep you in mind next time we have any surveys about--youth--soccer,” Dean ad-libbed as Sam approached him, frown first and the rest of him following.

“Telemarketing is a noble profession, Sam,” Dean informed Sam as he blew past Dean and started jangling keys in the rusty lock.

“As long as you have one.”

Sam sounded more morose than usual. Cheap suit. Handful of what looked like a grab bag of resumes, bank statements and red-inked foreclosure notices. “Two weeks, Sammy. Aren’t you proud? At some point they might even start paying me.”

Sam pushed against the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Then he pounded at it. “No,” he grunted. “I’m _not_ ”--another pound, but no dice--“proud. You wanna know why, Dean? Because I _know_ ”--shoulder check, and again nothing--“you’re capable of staying employed. It’s not rocket science. What I _don’t know_ ”--another shoulder check, with increased force. Nothing--“is why you’ve decided not to.” Sam kicked the door, hard, and it finally creaked free of its frame. “Fuck.” Sam wiped at his brow with the sleeve of his suit. “And why are you sitting out here? Couldn’t you have just--picked the lock or something?” he panted.

“‘Cause I knew I’d have to pretend I could do that.” Dean gestured towards Sam and the door, their invisible wrestling ring.

Sam’s expression softened momentarily. “Well, come in.” He offered his hand in aid, which Dean did not take.

Past the impenetrable door, the house had been gutted. Dean whistled. “Jeez, Sam. I saw the yard and thought maybe you’d gone OCD on all Bobby’s junk cars. Didn’t think you’d get rid of his furniture, too.”

“Well, it belongs to the bank now, Dean,” Sam snapped. “I kind of had to. Thanks for the help.”

The kitchen was a mess of brown packing boxes filled with books and loose leaf steno paper. Sam’s papers were perched like a flurry of white angels at the top of one of the stacks. Dean rifled through them--he was right; resume for one Samuel Haldigger, Robert Steven Singer’s bank statements, a whole lot of red--and returned them in a state of disorder.

Dean scooped through his _I didn’t I couldn’t I can’t_ s and bottomed out at, “I’m sorry.”

“Sure you are,” Sam muttered, terse and clipped, head buried in one of the boxes. When Dean didn’t challenge him, he looked up, sank into the box like a deflated balloon. “You didn’t come all this way just to say that. What’s wrong?”

Dean’s laughter was bitter. “Nothin’. Nothing’s wrong. I just need to borrow your car.”

Sam’s turn for laughter. “ _My_ car. You gotta be kidding me. What’s wrong with yours?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Dean repeated. “I just-- Where I’m going. I just don’t think she’d make it where I’m going.” It felt like he’d ripped out his stomach with the admission.

Sam remained incredulous. “ _My_ car,” he repeated, wide-eyed. “You gotta be kidding me. ‘Where you’re going’, you think that thing’d make it, but not the Impala? Dean, that thing barely makes it to town and back without something falling off it. Where the hell do you think you’re going to go?”

“Peñasquitos. California. Rancho Peñasquitos.” After a moment, words impossibly thick, “And yes. I do.”

The once-over Sam gave him after that made it seem like he’d sobered Sam into scrutiny. Once turned to twice-over. Three times over.

On the fourth, Dean started squirming. “If you’re waiting for the peep show, you’re not gonna get it, kiddo.”

“Have you slept?”

Even if Dean only had three wishes, he’d be calling on his genie now. Barring that, he tried to will Sam to color-blindness, away from the tell-tale bruised-dark, red-rimmedness of his eyes. He snorts. “Of course I have.”

But this was a conversation too well defended on Dean’s end--and he’d defend it to his death if he had to. He’s ready. Sam opted for another point of attack.

“So you need a car. How’d you get all the way out here? Walk? _Fly >?_”

“Funny. I took a bus. A couple buses.” Dean would use his second wish on a chair. He’d started to feel the strain of hiking all the way out to bumfuck Bobby’s-old-place out on the porch; that feeling was starting to come back full throttle: a decentralized pervasive ache down his back and hips and knee, outright pain when he moved, shifted weight. So maybe he wasn’t ready to fight to the death. But he’d still die trying, goddamn it.

“So hop on something westward and go to California that way,” Sam said, leadingly.

Back door approach. _Fuck you, Sam._ Dean dropped onto one of the boxes and rubbed his neck. “Because I can’t,” he said to Sam, and hated him.

“You could see a doctor,” Sam suggested.

“Yeah. Yeah, Sam, as fun as that sounds, I’m not going to sit around some podunk ER getting sneezed on just to say, Hey Doc. I’m pretty sure I fucked up everything. I’m pretty sure I’ve fucked everything for good. Do I get my lethal injection now?”

“You could see Lisa. Isn’t she back in school? Physical therapy...”

“Oh hey, you could go back to college, Sam. That sounds like fun,” said Dean, which stripped down meant something like _Not on your damn life, Sammy_ more than anything else. Though, Dean supposed, the question stood.

“You could go,” Sam countered. “It’s in vogue, after all. I hear Ben’s going. Lisa started up.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Really, you should give it a shot.” Sam placed a lid on one of the many boxes of tomes and steno books. “It’d be new for you.” Then he started filling another box, as though that were an answer.

“You should go see Lisa,” Sam says after a while, to cover Dean’s distracted lapse in conversation.

The pain in Dean’s shoulder was almost hell, hedging the nexus between unbearable and annoying in ways that meant it was the only thing Dean could think about. Every neural pathway, tender ending, reflex twinge--it had all rewired, made his shoulder a goddamn rockstar. Dean wondered what he’d ever done to give his shoulder the right to be such a bitch.

Right. Everything.

He was doing everything he could to keep from grandstanding exquisite discomfort. “What?” he said, to test his voice. “ _Been_ seeing Lisa. Been living with her. She’s back with Mark, did you know that?”

“So that’s where you went. Aren’t they--weren’t they div--”

“Separated. Four years. Now they’re back. And don’t act like it’s some big surprise where I was. You wanted it.”

“I said I needed some time alone.”

“You know what you meant.”

“Yeah, _I_ do.” Sam looked at him imploringly, but the argument was over. “Want to help me pack these up? I want to rent a lock-up when I’m rolling in, you know, the astounding wealth of regular minimum wage pay. Right now they’re just going out in the field. Lend a hand, will you?”

Dean sucked in air. “God, no.” For some reason there was a splintering pressure coming from inside his shoulder, a pressure inside his shoulder somehow--and what Dean really needed was for the whole project, muscles and tendons and scar tissue and bone, to explode. Fuck. He buried his eyes in his hand, screwed them shut tight enough to see pointillist rainbows on black, all the colors of pain broken into violent detail.

Then Sam grabbed him.

For seven seconds, Dean was pretty sure he’d just up and gone, ceased to exist altogether. Then he crashed, spilled like raw egg through Sam’s fingers, ended up with Sam right in his face.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Dean, but I’m a little upset right now. I’m upset because I’m about to be homeless-- _again_ \--and you’re too busy self-destructing to give a damn. Figured I’d reprise the role, because it was so fun the first time around. Driving around with you and Dad. Because Dad couldn’t figure out that families run on more than a tank of gas. And now you’re doing it, too.”

Dean drew a gasping breath. Sam had apparently forced him to some higher threshold of agony; coming down, everything else felt that much more livable. _Stop,_ he said, voicelessly. Then, “Stop.”

It wasn’t a command until Dean grabbed a hunk of Sam’s hair with his good arm, jerked Sam to the ground headfirst, jaw smacking knee on the trip down. “Diggina little deep, don’t you think, Sammy--” Dean coughed and slid off the box, closer to the barrage of expletives Sam mumbled in response. “We can’t do this.”

“No, but I know a girl who definitely would.” A smack of lips. Dean felt hot wet breath at his nape, heard the panting of hounds, the scratch of claws on tile. “Hello, ladies.”

Dean swore. “Meg.”

“I know,” said Meg.

“What are you even doing here still. Don’t you have a hole to crawl into? This is our hole.”

“I used to,” Meg allowed. “I think you know what happened to it. I think _you_ happened to it.”

“Oh, get over yourself,” Dean hissed. Meg was all old barbs and empty talk, threatless innuendos, vessel all taut translucent skin, dark veins, and greying hair. Her invisible hounds circled the room like old scars, thin jagged shadows of what they’d been. Maybe what they should still be. What the hell did Dean know. At some point, they’d done something right and got Hell gone. Hell-minus-Meg gone. Hell was gone, and Heaven left, and the rest of them got left with whatever shit they were stewing in now. So what the hell did Dean know.

“So. Decennial check up. How’s your world without Hell?”

“Better,” Sam answered instantly, pulling himself from the ground. He rubbed his jaw.

“All. under. _Heaven_ , Sammy,” Meg crooned. “Ask any hunter. If there’s any left--dying breeds.”

Dean tensed, which was entirely not worth the effort.

“Just let it go, Dean. Fuck.” Sam massaged his jaw, where it joined his neck. “Forget about Meg, forget about your-- _whatever_ in California--”

“--Woman in white,” Dean supplied.

“Your--oh for the love of god. You gotta be kidding me. Just--just leave it, Dean. I mean it.”

Meg clapped him on his bad shoulder. It collapsed under her touch, plunged him into the void of almost-hell, blunted by reality and hazy with memory. The trip ended with Meg’s lips on his (goddamn it), papery and cold (goddamn it), leather tongue stretched to the back of his throat (god _damn_ it).

Confrontation, suspicion, regurgitation. These and more occurred to Dean. Then he decided he didn’t give a damn, and kissed back.

“What was that?” Sam sprang towards them so quick it was like he wanted in on the action.

“Hell is almost gone. I can feel it,” Meg said, abruptly cutting her lips from Dean’s. 

Sam nodded slowly.

“Kill me.”

Sam shook his head slowly.

“I know you have the knife. Kill me.” 

Again, Sam shook his head.

“What Helen Keller’s trying to say,” Dean started, before his train of thought jumped a rail. Detour tracks rattled pain pain pain.

“Sam’s trying to say--” he started again. “You’re stuck on this ride with the rest of us. So strap in, because you’re not getting out ‘til I figure out how I can get the fuck out. Because _believe_ me--

\--What?”

Sam was pale, clammy-looking, like he’d been left in the tub one too many hours.

“What?” Dean repeated

Hellhounds prowled the room, the ripple of air and invisible glamour the room’s only movement.

“ _What._ ”

 

Better not to ask.


	2. Chapter 2

♦ PART TWO ♦

School wasn't interesting. Class, lunch, life driven by bells and hall monitors. Dean and Graciela indeed had one class in common, though not in the same period--English with a stunner named Mrs. Pokhart, who was about three hundred years old and knew dog CPR. Graciela loved her. Graciela wanted to be a veterinarian when she grew up. Go figure.

This all came up because the spring quarter was just starting up, and Mrs. Pokhart's three English classes were starting their 'careers and vocations' unit. Ten pages, works cited in MLA format. At least one primary source interview, if possible (the guy who wanted to be an Egyptologist was shit out of luck on that one. He didn't seem too pleased when Dean suggested he be a high school teacher instead). Due May 16th.

Fucking fantastic.

Days passed. Dad shifted in and our of their lives, in timely increments that were familiar, and life was as normal. Dean only hoped that once Dad had tracked the thing, he'd bring them along for the hunt. He'd sent Dean and Sam on short research errands--library stuff (no interviews--Dean could fake twenty-one better than most twenty-one year olds, but thirty and over wasn't a go, especially when the venue wasn't in smoky half-light) mostly, some street casing. It was all the interesting stuff--mostly history, crime cases and whatever, not the centuries-old monster magic tomes that Dean hated so much. He didn't like libraries as a general rule, but he'd rather be researching the dead guys than the hypothetical monster that probably didn't kill them. It was so much harder to justify spending time on that; it really was.

Weeks passed. Sometimes Graciela would walk to school instead of being driven past them--after that first gas incident, and their one hundred mile trek up to the white Oceanside bridge--and Sam and Dean would know Veronica was out, too. It was strange to think that she didn't know. That she had no fucking clue what the world was up against. Well, she probably had a _clue_ \--if Veronica was as subtle as Dad was, even at his most secretive, it was pretty damn easy to tell when something was up. She wasn't an idiot. 

But one look at her and Dean knew she was no hunter. She didn't have that hunger, or that kind of kicked look that sometimes saw in Sam, and felt in himself. That mixture of fear and the knowledge of weakness full frontal.

Because Dad said there was a cosmic lock on the whole hunting evil deal--Graciela must not know. She must not know or Veronica will shoot them all--most of Dean's conversations with her involved vague one-liners.

 "Your mom's gone again, huh." He'd say behind her, when she kept walking briskly down the street without turning around or saying hello.

"So's your dad," she would reply. Silence. They'd keep walking. Sam would outstrip the both of them, then turn left to the middle school. They kept straight. The stoplights flashed their trichromatic ditty. "They took her car."

That was pretty much a conversation ender. Nobody really wanted to contemplate the possible benefits of Dad and Veronica's--or John and Mama's, depending on who you were talking to--not-quite-friendship to working relationship to who the hell knew what else.

At the one month mark, Graciela sprung a new topic on their morning routine and asked Dean what his career report was about. You know, that career report. Yeah, the career report he may have sort of forgotten about. "Oh, that one," he said. And Graciela continued: He hadn't really talked about, and she wanted to know if he wanted any tips, since he didn't have any experience with Mrs. Pokhart's grading style. ("Include pictures," Graciela advised solemnly. "Print them on the computer if you can. She thinks visual aids are the Second Coming or something. It's instant favor.")

Dean thought about his career project. It was at the bottom of his backpack somewhere. He'd meant to do it, he really had, he'd gone to the library and channel surfed, or whatever it was you called it for books. But he'd ended up looking through the paper archives and comparing news tidbits about an Arturo Francesco, so he hadn't actually read anything about firefighters. He hadn't read anything about bull fighters, either, which he figured would at least get him some pretty interesting visual aids.

\--

Sam drew two lines from the same point, like the roof of a house. At the top, he put My Family Tree. Then he crossed it out, and wrote The Big Bang instead. He drew a line and named the first ten lifeforms his life science textbook mentioned. Some pre-cellular things. Then the cellular ones. Multi-cellular. He had tons of relatives.

Then he crossed everything out. This was stupid. This was really, really stupid. He crumpled up the piece of paper and tried to launch it into the wastebasket at the other end of the couch. 

Failing that, he went in search of Veronica. "What’s up, kid?" she asked. Sam was always ‘kid.’

“You have a computer, right?”

 

Sam didn't know Mom's original name, before she was married. There were a lot of Mary Winchesters in Kansas, believe it or not. But there was only one Mary Campbell who'd died in a housefire in November 1983. 

"That's your mother," said Veronica. "Mary Campbell."

She was survived by a cousin, Dustin Campbell, and his three daughters and two sons. The article didn't even mention that she'd been married, or that she had children. Sam guessed that Dustin must have been the Uncle from Iowa. A picture of a crinkled up obituary on a computer that was about an inch tall probably should not be an end-all for judging character, but it made Sam think that maybe Dad and Dean weren't actually exaggerating the guy. Sam had to admit, he was a little stung at not even being included in her memory. Like they weren't a big enough part of her life to even exist.

"Are you sure that's her?" Sam asked Veronica, though Sam didn't know how Veronica would possibly know. Childhood friend or not, in Sam's experience coincidences were known to happen at the least convenient times. And how was he supposed to trust this Internet thing, anyway? Maybe it wasn't even a real newspaper clipping.

"That's her," Veronica replied, lips tight. "That's definitely her."

"How do you know?"

"When you've met enough dead people, and you've read enough of these, you just know." Which didn't seem like any answer at all. "You don't know the whole story," Veronica continued. “Ask your dad what happened.”

Sam snorted. "He wouldn't talk about that if he'd been dead a hundred years. He just wouldn't."

"You'd be surprised how much your dad would be willing to tell you," said Veronica. "He's told you a lot."

Dad hadn't told him anything. Dean had. Sam had inferred, Dean had confirmed, and Dad had picked up from there. Dad had mostly assumed, and then ordered, and then expected. It wasn't the same thing.

It was like Veronica could read his thoughts. "At least he didn't lie to you."

That, Sam thought, was the biggest lie of all. The absolute biggest lie of all. At that moment, Sam decided they were done with lying. 

"Can I keep looking on this?" 

"Wouldn’t have brought you back if you weren’t allowed, kid,” said Veronica. "The stuff’s around. I know it is. You just gotta look and see what you can find.”

 

Sam found out that his grandma and grandpa were in a rotary club, and their names were Samuel and Deanna Campbell. Which was a precious bit of information, because Sam felt like it explained everything.

It didn't actually, obviously. He could imagine Dean blowing him off, like it was completely uninteresting. "So they're named Samuel and Deanna. So we were obviously named after them. _Everyone_ does that. That's not all that important."

"That's just 'cause you're named after a girl," Sam knew he would respond. And then it would be lost. The information would be useless again, and Sam would be left back at square one. He couldn't do that. Even if there was a chance Dean didn't take it like that--and obviously he would, because when didn't he?--Sam couldn't possibly risk it. No. This was going to be his, and his alone. He scribbled down everything he could about Samuel and Deanna Campbell, mom's brother Dustin, the one in Iowa, and his children, which were only numbers.

At this point, he probably knew more about this entire family than anyone else alive. Because all he really needed to do was beat this mysterious Uncle Dustin and Dad. Dad didn't count, because there was tons of stuff he'd never ever know about Sam, about Dean; and Uncle Dustin doesn't count because as far as he was concerned Sam and Dean and Dad didn't even exist. Writing out history was automatic disqualification. So Sam won, because Sam always wins.

His eyes were beginning to water from staring at Veronica's screen as long as he had, grey-blue-green and white and pulsing. He figured he had enough to go off of. He could nail Samuel and Deanna to within at least a decade of their births, though he couldn't find the exact date. They'd died on the same day. And apparently together, in some kind of unexpected accident the newspaper didn't identify. Sam was hoping car crash, or tornado, or something good and normal like that, though he's pretty sure that this family couldn't possibly be so lucky. Maybe whatever had killed them had come to finish the job that night, the night Mom died. But Sam didn't want to think about that because that meant that whatever had gone after them was coming after them, coming after them the way Dad suspected and the way Sam adamantly didn't want to be true. Not because he didn't think they could take it--though he was pretty sure they couldn't. He was twelve, and Dean wasn’t anything he thought he was, and Dad--Dad was invincible, but he was still Dad. He was still human. And that meant he kind of lost, no matter what. Sam didn’t want it to be true because that meant that everything Dad had done, and everything he'd made them do, was perfectly justified. And Sam didn't think he could deal with that. The idea that all of the crazy and all of the moving and the training and the sacrifices were actually worth it seemed pretty nice in theory, but it also meant that the world was just as fucked up as Dean and Dad thought it was.

That nothing mattered, because how could it, when everything was that fucked up?

And Sam didn't think he could deal with that. Not in a million years.

"You know, I've always wanted to be a veterinarian."

While Dean charmed Graciela out of her library books, Sam idled on the cement step out front, dreamed up Papi's Dog. He could almost see her charging through the weeds in the front yard, dandelion heads snapped like so many necks, heads rolling. She was a desperate, furious thing, all hackles and bad teeth, wild eyes and secret dental fractures--and Papi is a great shadow of a man, to fit the dog. He doesn't use a leash. He can command her without rules, because he's Papi. That's power. And because there are no rules, no one else could ever own her. That's insurance.

And Sam thought that, maybe a little, he knows how that might be. Papi's Dog doesn't care what he has to do, so long as he can keep on being Papi's.

Sam took out his notebook and began to write.

It had only been ten, fifteen minutes, and Dean backed through the screen door, arms laded with a dozen books, lacquer-shiny, crisp, and new. "It's due tomorrow, you know," said Graciela. She followed Dean out the door as though she didn't quite trust him with her books. Her porch to the car. Car to their apartment. Up to the fourth floor. Back down. Sam could see the working in her eyes, tallying up the mishaps that tended to collapse around them, the carelessness of boys, _Dean._

"How 'bout I come tomorrow and get the books in the morning? We can walk to the school together. I'll just take them, it's all right. I kinda wanted to look at them again, you know? Before the oral."

"I'm not gonna lose your books overnight." Dean stepped off the cement ledge backwards with a lurch.

"Then be ready early. I wanna show you something before school. And Sam, too. What time are you gonna get up?"

Dean said something vague and noncommittal which was probably supposed to be cool, and they were at the car and pulling away from the curb with well-practiced expedience.

Home was no different; the same filmy light flooded the living room in whiskey-amber shafts, unfurnished but for the bags in the corner, gathering dust, and the cardboard castle lurched up against the kitchen counter. Dad hadn't been there.

Sam leaned up against the kitchen sink and thrust himself sideways to try for a drink of water, and ran into Dean, checking the gun. It was still here, with the familiar rusty rods, the skeleton of had probably once been a scrub brush. Sam swallowed, and tried to disappear the water's hard taste. "What d'you think Graciela wants to show us?"  
   
"Her new bra, I hope."

"That's gross."

 "Don't worry, Sam. You're not gonna have to wear it."

 

At 7:30, Sam turned the kitchen light on, and Dean, squinting in the then-darkness at _True Confessions of a Veterinarian_ , continued to squint under the pale fluorescence. Dinner passed without mention. Sam finished pre-algebra, then his family tree. He would have been done hours earlier, but the tree could not be rushed. He drew thin, spindly lines for branches, like the tree out of the picture Dad had in his journal. Dustin Campbell, born 1936. His eight children, unnamed but abundant, like fruit. Taller branches: A Samuel and Deanna Campbell, born 1912 and 1919. That's the top of the tree, but even lopsided and stunted as it is, it's the most Sam has ever known, and it's the most Sam has ever kept from his brother at any one time.

He's pretty good on not keeping things from Dean. Part of this was because whatever Sam's ability to lie (it's pretty good; without reservations Sam's sure it's really pretty good) to Dean he's always naked as a pin-up girl (to use Dean's example). Part of this was because he's never really had anything to keep. Dustin and his eight, and Samuel and Deanna, were small secrets, pixelated names on a digital page, but they were his.

The tree was probably the best thing Sam Winchester had ever put together. It was certainly the truest. He slid it between his pre-algebra and Theogony, into the dark flat safeness of his backpack.

 "Cereal?" Dean asked, just past midnight. He was snapping up a handful of Fruit Loops, one by one. Sam nodded, caught the box Dean lobbed at him, though the cardboard crumpled in his grip. Sam looked to Dean's set up on his side of the living room. A page of sideways notes, written in deft block print. Items flying off in the margins scrawled in less formal penmanship. _True Confessions of a Veterinarian_ was thoughtfully not dog-eared; instead, napkins feathered between every tenth page or so. He'd moved on to  The Barefoot Veterinarian, though the other ten books, sprawled out in a broken rainbow on the grey-green carpet, appeared untouched.

Sam licked Fruit Loops off his fingers one by one, color by color. "How's it going?" he asked, though nothing in recent memory would have granted him any expectation that Dean would actually be all that keen on answering.

\--

Sam clearly hadn’t expected Dead to boomerang the question, which made him feel strangely proud.

Sam looked up, vague expression on his face like he didn't quite believe he'd heard Dean ask what he did. "Not sure yet."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Dean gave him his best no bullshit frown, though according to Sam it wasn't the most convincing expression in the world. Again, whatever. 

"We're reading some parts out of this book called Theogony," Sam explained, after he'd sighed, and closed the book. He gave Dean an annoyed pout. "It's a genealogy of the gods--basically a family tree."

"I know what geneaology means."

"Sure you do. But anyway, that's not my point. It's basically a family tree, so we're supposed to like, research our family and stuff and make our own tree."

Dean snorted. "Gonna be a pretty short tree, dude. Maybe a bush."

"I have to go back _at least_ to my grandparents, she said."

'She' was an amorphous young woman of indeterminate description. Any time Dean had gotten more curious than that, Sam had shut right up. Probably meant she was young and hot as hell. Not that Dean really went for teachers. They tended to have this kind of sappy world mission that revolved around the plots of teacher movies, like that one about the Mexican kid, who'd been played by the Filipino kid. Then Dean shifted back to reality. "Well, that's gonna be kinda funny, dude, because I really don't think you're gonna get that information out of dad."

"I don't see why not," Sam challenged him. The defiance in his voice was oddly personal. Like Dean had actually said something wrong. "I mean, it's not like knowing the names of our grandparents, maybe even where they lived, what years they were born or died or whatever, is actually going to do anything to us. It's not like I'm gonna go off and live with them."

"Oh, really? You're not? You coulda fooled me," said Dean, though it was probably unwarranted. Sam had never threatened to actually run off. He'd mope outside, run up to the rooftop or some other emo punk thing like that, but he'd never actually threatened to leave. He wouldn't dare. He wouldn't want to. Whatever Sam didn't have with him and Dad, he knew what he _did_ have, and it's not like he was going to throw that away just like that. No way.

"I just need to know for my stupid report," said Sam. "Do you know?"

"Yeah right," said Dean. "All I know of is that one uncle in whatever state that was, like Iowa or something? The one where Dad avoids the entire property like the damn plague, just because he's in it. Maybe he thinks if he stays away our Uncle Whosit'll be eaten by a vampire or something. Or better yet, he'll be turned and Dad will be able to off him himself."

Sam blanched. "Dean, shut up. That's not the reason. Dad wouldn't do that."

Dean shrugged. "Hell, to that guy? I would. You remember him that one time."

"He just wanted to know if Dad wanted an adjoining plot. He didn't say anything bad."

"He was asking Dad about his grave, dude. That's kinda bad no matter how you swing it. Do you know what passive-aggressive means? I'll give you a hint--you act it all the time. Bitch."

"Jerk," Sam started. "It's not like he was telling Dad to get _inside_ the plot. It was a nice gesture. He was going to make sure Mom and Dad could be buried together."

"I don't think Dad's bones are going to give much of a damn whether they're next to Mom's in a hundred years, or not. They probably won't even have graves by then. We'll be living in pods, like in that one movie we saw that one time, in Arizona."

"Dean, you're doing it again."

"What am I doing?"

"You're being ridiculous."

"You're ridiculous."

"Seriously, Dean! You're being stupid. You're being really, really stupid."

And maybe it was true. But it was keeping him from being really, really stupid-er, because he kind of wanted to hit Sam right now. He wasn't sure exactly why, even a little bit, because it's not like Sam had really done anything yet--and Sam was perfectly capable of _doing_ things, that was for sure--but the whole conversation just kind of hit frayed nerves or something, because Dean really was going to hit him. He really, really--

"So make it up. If it's just a stupid project, make it up. That's what you do every other time. Like that one essay about the chupacabra. You got on A on that for "creative application of outside research" or something, didn't you? With that one ostrich teacher?"

"I don't know which teacher you're talking about. I only know their names."

"There's no way you remember all their names."

"Why not? You do. You just never use them."

"That's not the point. What I'm talking about Sam is, just make it up. Hell, I'm gonna make mine up. It'll be easy. It'll be _fun_. Play God for a while and just make up a family tree for us, okay? And make it awesome. We have twin cousins three hundred times removed, just sayin'. As an example."

Sam refused to speak to him for the rest of the evening.

Made for a long fucking evening. Dean sighed, for the millionth time, and tried to concentrate on the page in front of him. It had been the same page for the past three hours

The college course requirements for pre-vets were all kind of drooling out of the book and swishing down the drain with Sam's toothpaste in the back room. It wasn't like he really cared, because it's not like he was going to go off and be a veterinarian--it's something he can honestly say he's never had any thought about before, ever in his entire damn life--and he didn't see why it had to be such a big deal. He _should_ just screw the project and get on with life, because it doesn't really apply.

Sam tapped the handle of his toothbrush against the sink three times, as usual, and Dean tried to pull himself back to animal communications and bacteriology. He wasn't actually sure what bacteriology meant, outside of fun times with cheek swabs and microscopes, or long lists of 'invisible things that can kill you' and he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do with all of this, since listing it the way it was in the book was probably plagiarism. And between the fake IDs and the pathological lies, you can't have _that_.

Veterinarians have to take a lot of classes in college, he wrote. They're mostly things about biology and for some reason, psychology. The he crossed it all out. He kept 'veterinarians.'

Maybe it would be better to start from the beginning. There was a prompt somewhere, hidden in the bundle of papers he'd managed to keep hold of up to this point.

What do you want to be when you become and adult?

Who will you be?

How will you get there?

Dean wrote that he wanted to be a veterinarian when he grew up because he'd always been really interested in stuff like the make-up of animals. What they ate, where they lived, whether they lived in packs or not... That kind of thing. His father, who was not a veterinarian, but an ex-Marine, had always made sure he and his brother kept track of that sort of thing. They moved around a lot so they saw all kinds of animals.

This, he crumpled into a ball and threw across the room. The ball was an eerie off-white glow in the dark corner by the window, a watching eye. Not that any of that was true. It just seemed kind of stupid. Candyass, or something.

What do you want?

To be done with this shit, for one. It was 1am. Sam had gone off somewhere, into the bedroom, to Yemen, Dean didn't know and knowing Sam it could very well have been either.

Every hour, the pages bled. Margins widened. The center of the page opened up into expansive white nothingness. Type your report, if you can. Write in cursive. Dean's wasn't typed, and it wasn't in cursive. This was mostly because it just didn't exist at all. At 4am it was really difficult to bullshit a reason Dean wanted to be a veterinarian--one that would fly with Sweet Valley or whatever the hell this school was called, in any case. He could think of plenty of reasons he'd want to be a veterinarian, provided he was a veterinarian in the sense that Sam was actually the Sam Winchester everyone--including Sam--seemed to think he was, and provided he was a veterinarian in the sense that Dad was actually a contractor, or a cable repair guy (what a riot--especially after the toaster incident), or a New Yorker journalist (who'd wandered into Nowhere, Tennessee for, what, the hell of it? on the offchance that there were some kind of dark evil thing that went creek in the dark?)

Yeah, Dean could be a veterinarian. In the same sense that this report could have actual words in it.

Dean Winchester  
Mrs. Pokhart  
English 11  
April 14, 1996

Insert Title Here

Dean curled his toes into the carpet, and felt the grains of dry adhesive between them. He wasn’t sure where his socks went--at some point they became too moist, or too hot, or too stretched. They were off-white ghosts somewhere in the deeper corners of the barren living room, along with the now-multiplied balls of ruled paper littering the ground beneath the far wall.

Dean wrote

When he becomes a veterinarian--the family business; not his father, but his grandfather, and his father before that--he's going to set up shop somewhere far away from here. Some place that actually has animals that aren't wannabe Black Dogs.

Dean let his pencil deepen the tornado he'd started scribbling around one of the binder holes. It grew and grew until the storm covered the entire margin, started dipping down into the lowest third of the page. _Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore._ He tried to imagine what it would be like to go into the same white stucco every morning, check the mail, be expected. He'd wear one of those white lab coats that make all doctors seem just _totally_ friendly and familiar, Doc Martens, some kind of ridiculous tie--the shole shebang. Whole shebang. He rakes the top of his tongue with his teeth. Wow. Just--wow.

 _Whole_ shebang. And Sam would be his biggest customer, bringing in his girlfriend's labradoodle or something like that. Figures Sam would get a labradoodle. Dean screwed his eyes shut.

He's starting to lose it.

It wasn’t even that late; he'd pulled a million all-nighters and then some. This was nothing. All he'd done was sit here the entire afternoon, he's got nothing to complain about. Besides, what did he have to show for it? An impressive collection of paper snowballs. A dull pencil.

He dug his knife out of his pocket, delving into his stiff jeans with a grimace. It seemed like a lot of work to stand up, just to get the knife out. Finally, he pinned the handle between his fingers, extracted the knife, and flipped open the blade. He bent over to get at one of the other books he'd borrowed from Graciela while he whittled at his pencil tip. Splintery brown shavings fell into the carpet and looked pretty much at home. The room creaked as the building settled, and Dean pulled himself back from his rumination on the carpet, tried to throw his focus back on the veterinarian book. Or at least the pencil. He whittled at it absently, strained to follow the black serpentine text across the pages of the book. He wasn't as successful as maybe he could have been.

It wasn’t that late.

Didn't stop the head rush that nearly sat him back on his ass when he stood. The world dipped back sideways, fell into the tornado scribbled in the margin of his empty page, and didn't stop until it had come full circle. Dean blinked, shook his head. Okay, so the sink seemed like a pretty good destination. Even better than it had seemed minutes before.

He wasn't really sure how Sam managed to drink out of that, though. He could see the mineral buildup even when he was washing his hands. Whitewater in their own damn kitchen. But whatever. Dad hadn't really left them with much. Dean knew what to do with the money, but buying water seemed really stupid. Not that he had any idea what he was supposed to be buying with it, since Dad always seemed vaguely concerned by his choices whenever he returned, saw the receipts, or the refuse. At least, back when he'd actually asked for the receipts. Lately, he'd either started trusting Dean more, or he'd become preoccupied by more important things. Dean would be putting his money on the latter any day.

He shuffled back to his nest on the living room carpet and picked up a stack of his binder paper, and the prompt. Made a paper cone. He turned the faucet on, just barely, and let it fill the entire cone. Whitewater, like he'd said. "It's just air bubbles," Sam insisted, though anyone could tell the difference with one taste.

_Uh huh, Sammy. And you remember those weirdass fountains in Colorado, right? That's called mineral water. This is. I don't even know--this is mercury-in-the-well water._

Sam said it came from an aqueduct in Los Angeles. They'd learned about it in California History last Thursday.

Dean closed his eyes--a welcome reprieve, since they honestly felt like they were made out of carpet gunk--and drank deeply. It absolutely wasn't worth it. Maybe a shower instead. Yeah, a shower. He could think about this thesis statement or something. Pokhart was always going on about thesis statements. If he could just figure that one out, he could probably bullshit his way through the rest of the report; historically it had worked pretty well.

He looked down at his paper cone. The innards were made out of his paper prompt, interrogatory, probing statements staring at him through a film of water. They were blurry at the edges, burning blue like a neck stuck in a noose. 

What do you want to be?

Where will you go?

The remaining water at the bottom of the cone was started to stain purple from the ink dripping down. He threw the entire thing into the trashcan. It was disturbingly empty; generally he and Sam weren't all that good about taking it out, but it was gone now. The paper cone glowed white like a ghost, like all the ghosts. Dean tried not to look too hard at the living room as he stepped over his backpack and his books and his remaining stack of paper (and hey, it'd be pretty good progress if he'd actually written on the paper missing from the stack. It's far diminished from its too-damn-expensive-per-sheet status) and made his way to the bathroom.

He didn't bother turning on the lights. He wasn't actually sure if there was a bulb in the hall light, actually. He'd never seen it on. Sam was the only one who ever turned on the lights. He probably thought it was normal or something. But all Dean could think about was beacons. Beacons like they kind they'd seen on their way down here, driving all down the coast. It just seemed like a stupid idea. The white fluorescence wasn't too bad; it was basic, made everything a truck-stop kind of ghoulish clear. But Dean wasn't really feeling the honey glow of end table lamps, or reading lights, or the kind that sat in the fishbowl lamps that split the hall ceiling into thirds.

They reminded him of the holes in his binder paper, white and empty and tornado-making.

The bathroom rug was still wet from Sam's excursion, though there wasn't any standing water this time. Which was an improvement. He and Sam had tackled the tub over the weekend, plugging up the gritty, failing caulking with whatever they could find at the bottom of the pack. Looked like it had worked.

Except for the part where that had been the weekend and now it was, what, Friday? Jesus. Where the hell had he been all this time. He was pretty sure time just passed differently down here. Closer to the equator or something. It's not because Dad was gone, because when the hell wasn't he? And Sam was the same. And he was the same.

He was absolutely fucking tired, in the beat-all sense. He stared at the shower head grainy-eyed, teeth feeling like they were free-floating, their enamel some kind of gooey myth beneath his tongue. Undressing seemed like a lot of work. He unstrapped his watch. 4:47am. Maybe he'd just put his head under the sink faucet. Maybe he'd just put it under the sink faucet and never lift it out.

 

\--

 

There was someone at the door. A woman. Maybe the woman, Veronica. He hadn't seen her in a long time, even when he stayed at Graciela's on Thursdays. It was raining.

Then he woke up. He woke up to the sound of the doorbell ringing, and water running. He scanned the other side of the room. Dean's sleeping bag was packed into the corner, piled up like a fat mound of flesh rather than a neat caterpillar roll. It hadn't moved all night. But the doorbell was still ringing.

It took Sam a few seconds to rise out of sleep and realize that if the water was running, and the doorbell was ringing, then Dean wasn't answering the door, their guest wasn't going away, and that meant he actually had to get out of bed.

Sam inched toward the door without disentangling himself from the inside layer of his sleeping back. Then he reached up to the doorknob and tried to pull himself out of the nylon and polyester mess. The living room was dark, even with the kitchen light on. He wasn't sure what time it was. It looked like Dean had been hard at work for a good while, though Sam didn't see anything that looked like triumph.

It was Graciela at the door. It was still dark outside. "What are you doing here? It's the middle of the night," Sam asked blearily. He wasn't sure if he'd actually woken up, or just returned to the dream. He was pretty sure they'd done this part before.

"It's 5:30," said Graciela matter of factly. "And I have something I want to show you. But we have to get an early start, because it's not gonna be too close."

She looked beyond Sam. "Where's Dean?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know."

Graciela looked at him. "What is that even supposed to mean?"

Sam shrugged.

Sam honestly hadn't thought about that. It was one of those reflex answers, was his best guess. Since clearly he knew exactly where Dean was. It wasn’t like there were all that many choices, after all. But there you go. "Would you like to come in?" Sam asked.

Graciela came in.

She scrutinized their apartment appraisingly, though it wasn't as thought they had all that much to appraise. They only things they really had were in the fridge, the two sleeping bags in the back room, their school stuff, and a closet full of odds n’ ends. Piano wire, iron rounds, cat's eye shells. Those kinds of things. And that was in the closet. The back closet.

Graciela looked at her books strewn across the living room, pencil shavings making a mound on the carpet. Dean had left the knife. Impulse made Sam want to run and close the blade, hide it somewhere before Graciela could see, but Graciela had seen. The impulse didn't make that much sense, anyway; Graciela knew. Because Veronica knew.

"I haven't seen your mom around lately," said Sam, as casually as he could muster. He was about as casual as the Neighborhood Watch.

"Haven't seen your dad around lately," she countered. "Look, if he's not gonna come out or whatever..."

"Who's not going to come out?" Dean emerged from the angled hallway, combing his fingers through damp hair. It splayed out in limp spikes in every direction. He looked tired for a split second. Then he looked like Dean.

"It's about time. Look, I wanna show you guys something. How did your report go?" Graciela folded her arms around her, hugging her jacket tight. An ice breeze wafted in from the dark beyond the front door.

"My--" Dean started. "Oh. Right. That. Yeah, that was fine. You have some really...interesting research material. I can definitely see why you want to be a vet."

Graciela sneered, though her eyes held no vitriol. "You're an ass. Did you read any of those at all?"

"Of course I did. Bacteriology. Animal communications. Irish setters are beautiful and amazing."

"So what'd you write?"

"I said that I was going to be a vet for my kid brother's labradoodle."

Sam rolled his eyes. Figured.

"So what's this thing you want to show us at five in the damn morning? Some of us don't get up 'til six. If it's the sunrise, I swear to God--"

"We're going north, not east."

"Nor--"

"East, as in..the sunset. You know?"

"Yeah, I know. You know, jokes are a lot less amusing when the person feels like they need to explain them."

"It wasn't a joke."

Which is about when Sam tuned out. But they ended up in the Impala, with Dean gunning the engine loud enough to wake the entire block. They hit the 5 at six, just in time for the beginning of the commuter's traffic. Which meant there were about twelve other cars on the road, but apparently that was some kind of egregious sin in Dean's book. 

"I don't see why California can't just have normal highways. You know, the good old American kind where you drive off into the sunset or whatever."

"Because if California drove into the sunset, they'd hit the Pacific first," Graciela answered absently. "Just keep on the 5. We've got like a hundred miles to go."

Sam jolted. _A hundred?_

"A _hundred_?" Dean said. "Where the hell are we going? Disneyland?"

"Oceanside."

Which was followed by some rumination on why the hell anyone would name a city Oceanside, when there were a hundred oceanside cities all up and down the--get this--the coast that were just as oceanside as Oceanside, if not more so. Sam rested his cheek against the curve of the door.

When he woke, they were turned out on a dirt shoulder, engine ticking. "Up and at 'em, dude," said Dean, jabbing him in the side.

"Next time I get shotgun," Graciela announced, she she climbed out of the back passenger door. "I want more leg room."

"Yeah, I don't think so," Dean answered, though he seemed more concerned by the scenery--or lack thereof, since it didn't seem like there was really anything all that remarkable about this particular stretch of highway--than the chatter that had mucked up the entire drive there. He still hadn't gotten around to fixing the radio. 

"Why not?"

"Doesn't work that way. There's certain things you gotta be able to do if you wanna ride shotgun." 

"Oh, really," said Graciela. Sam appreciated the gesture, but he wasn't sure what in the world Dean was talking about, either.

Dean shrugged. "That's just how it works. Shotgun's something you gotta earn. You wanna earn it?"

Hell yeah she did. Of course she did. Sam was beginning to think this was some kind of awful plot to get him to embarrass himself. Since that seemed like Dean's new thing and all. Or some thing.

"Rock paper scissors. Best two out of three." He winked at Sam.

Graciela frowned. "Oh, you're making that up. Here, we need to cross the freeway. It's on the other side."

Cross the freeway. Because it wasn't, you know, being painted shiny by steely hunks of metal doing 80 or anything. "That's why we had to get here early. My papi lived in Oceanside, so he always came from the other direction..."

But cross they did. They waited for the cars to thin, and ran straight out behind the puff of exhaust and the clatter of small pebbles and rocks and snapped up behind the cars. Sam kept his eyes shut, blindly slamming pavement the entire time. If he was going to get smacked by a car, he didn't want to see it coming. His imagination was working on overdrive as it was.

At the other side of the road, Graciela must not have stopped running, because Dean grabbed Sam by the shirt when they dipped down and jerked him sideways. Sam stumbled, feet working like crab legs in an attempt to sprint sideways, before he swung the rest of his boy around, eyes open, and, panting, tried to regain the ground that had spread out between him and Dean and Graciela.

"So what are we looking for?" Dean shouted above the highway wind. They'd slowed to a jog, trekking up the hills and down into the water-filled gullies beside the road.

"Just a place," said Graciela. "A bridge he used to visit all the time."

True to form, the bridge slid up beside the highway, out of the 6 o'clock glare, like a white skeleton.

"My papi used to come play here." 

It wasn't that impressive. It was an old wooden thing, rickety and sun-bleached white. Deep cracks cut through the wood like old scars, split and wrinkled. It looked like one of those old mining structures you could find further inland. Sam didn't have any idea what it would have been used for when it was first made.

He looked to Dean. 

"Hey, don't look at me."

Graciela turned to face them both. Great. Sam glared, mouthed 'thank you' at Dean, who was pointedly examining the bridge in a more tactile fashion.

"What'd he play?"

"I don't know. He never said. We'd just drive by sometimes, and he'd always point it out."

"You think if I looked hard enough, I'd see, like, some crazy carving with your mom and dad's name surrounded by one of those hearts with the arrow in it?"

Sam vanished behind a tall clump of grass, thick and sticky with morning wet and seedlings. It was quiet here. You could still hear the highway; it wasn't that kind of quiet. But there wasn't much else--just the wind and the cars and more wind.

It was nice. In that haunted kind of way.

Sam stumbled back through the grass just in time to hear Dean break the silence. He'd been kicking absently at the base of one of the bridge's supports when the whole thing lurched, swung slightly, just enough for the top to block out the rising run, cast shadows. A splintering groan, and one of the support beams fell. They all jumped back, but the bridge was silent again.  
 "Good job."

"Hey, nothing broke. Nothing important anyway." Dean looked pretty happy. “Lookit that.”

Dean pointed at the rotted beam. Geraldo will always want Veronica’s, it read. Veronica’s what, if there was a what, was lost to splinters and black mold.

Graciela’s nose wrinkled.

After a bit, when Sam would not deign to comment, Dean said, “That’s pretty kinky, right?”

Sam looked at him. Tried to implore him into silence.

“Yeah, that’s pretty kinky. I mean, now we know what kind of ‘playing’ he did here, right?”

“Dean, shut up.”

Dean punched a fist in the air and ran around to the other side of the bridge. “Dude, I love this thing. That was so much better than a cupid heart. _So_ much better!”

Graciela, skin blush red under brown skin, like Arizona clay, turned back to the highway. “I think we should go back to school now,” she said. “Let’s go. Let’s go back to school.”

Dean crowed the entire way.

\--

He must have been asleep, because the next thing Dean knows is someone prodding him in the small of his back with a freshly sharpened pencil. He edged awake, grabbed the edge of consciousness like a high ledge and pulled himself up out of the dark with a shaky heave. _Fuck._

"Dean Winchester."

He mouthed something likely incoherent and probably not school-appropriate. Desks seats hurt like hell. He didn't understand how it was possible to make a chair that uncomfortable. 

"Mr. Winchester. Your report."

"Affirmative."

"That's not funny. Where's your career report?"

Dean bent down and unzipped his backpack. He could feel thirty-two pairs of eyes all on him, not the least of which were Mrs. Pokhart's, behind her red-rimmed glasses and her fifty million pounds of facial cleaner stuff. There was a notebook folded at the bottom of the pack, which was pretty impressive, Dean thought. There was even a pen, a pencil. Some binder paper with actual writing on it. He vaguely remembered something about, what was it, rectal examinations? No, bacteriology. Irish setters. Labradoodles. All of the above. Jesus christ. He looked up with his signature crooked grin and shrugged.

"I didn't want to be a veterinarian, anyway."

Mrs. Pokhart's lips pursed together so tightly Dean could see the cracks in her lipstick where the foundations were splintering away under the pressure. "Well, then what, pray tell, would you like to be, Mr. Winchester?"

The class tittered. Somehow Dean didn't think it would help take the heat off of him if he gave everyone in the damn room some universal fuck off. Dean rubbed his eyes.

"I hope that long night was spent composing something of utter beauty that you will now share with the class in lieu of your report, Mr. Winchester."

Dean laughed. God, this woman was a riot. She was giving him _way_ too much credit. "Are you sure about that, Mrs. Pokhart?" He looked up at her innocently. "Because it was pretty utterly beautiful, if you know what I mean."

The class tittered again, like some entire universal body of adolescent... well. He had to hand it to them. They were pretty much like they should be. "Utterly beautiful and. Supple. Nubile. Fleshy?"

Mrs. Pokhart reddened. Dean sat back in his desk and tried his best to look like he was about do dominate the hell out of Mrs. Pokhart's lily-white Puritanical ass. _Way_ too much credit. "That will suffice, Mr. Winchester."

"Do I get an A?"

"Mr. Winchester. What, pray tell," she says again, as though she wasn't parroting herself, hadn't just said almost the exact same thing only moments ago. "Are you going to do with your life?"

Dean eyed her defiantly. But suddenly, he's not sure. He's really not. He's going to save people, hunt things. Be a goddamn hero. Be a goddamn hero like his Dad. Dad, who--for all the hell he knew--was off banging some chick, some chick who was Graciela's _mother_ , and hunting evil from underneath semen-soaked sheets, bad room service, and way too many suspicious stains. But what did he know.

"I--" Dean started. The words catch in his throat. Suddenly this hands ache, muscle memory doubling back on the feeling of his pencil jammed between his fingers, before he'd whittled it down to nothing. 

Mrs. Pokhart's mouth twitched, and she put her hands to her stomach, like she was trying to keep something from escaping from it. "Continue, Mr. Winchester."

"I don't want to be _anything_." Dean grabbed his bag, snapping the zipper closed, and slung it over his shoulder. When he moved to rise, however, Mrs. Pokhart stopped him. 

"I don't think so, Mr. Winchester. Class isn't over for another 41 minutes by my count."

Again, the class tittered. They really were a bunch of hive-minded aliens. Fuck.

Dean's face felt hot, and a wet, uncomfortable itch worked its way across this shoulders like a ghost's touch. He hunched over his desk and folded his arms across its surface.

Mrs. Pokhart returned to the front of the classroom, but Dean didn't hear a word she said. He was betting not too many of the other dipshits in the room did, either, since they were too busy staring at him. One of the girls in the back row, Cindy Salk, said, "But that's worth half of our entire grade! She wouldn't let him turn it in late, would she? She wouldn't would she?" If Dean thought he could get away with it, he would have turned around and told Cindy Salk that, _You know honey, you seem pretty overly concerned, babe. And maybe you should mind your own damn business._

But that seemed like a lot of work that would take a lot of maneuvering to get out of without Mrs. Pokhart giving his father a call home. Woman had a twitchier trigger finger than Jose, strung out _and_ itching for a hunt. And Dean's all too familiar with what happens when a call home goes unanswered for too long, or a notice is sent home and a parent fails to materialize at the school for the meeting. For some reason, that seemed like a shit thing to be getting into over Cindy Salk and not wanting to be a veterinarian when he grew up.

Ernie Something-Polish threw an eraser at Dean's head. Dean ducked nonchalantly, and it hit Mario. Ernie, he really did flip off. But hell, Ernie deserved it. He really did.

Dean jerked his backpack open again, and it made a snapping noise as the stitches tensed. The zipper snagged on itself and only opened halfway, but Dean was able to feed his folded, vaguely water (or is that lighter fluid? Oh, it's definitely lighter fluid-damaged notebook out of the truncated opening, and even the pen, too. It was the one that skipped every fourth letter or whatever, but it's better than nothing. He opened the notebook to the cleanest page he could find and wrote in neat, block print:

HELLO, MY NAME IS DEAN WINCHESTER.

When I grow up, I'm going to be a serial killer.


	3. Chapter 3

♦ PART TWO (continued) ♦

Dean walked up the eight floors to their apartment and kicked the door open. It was unlocked, which meant Sam was already home. Sam was already home, and Sam had been stupid about the door, like usual. "Lock it when you're here!" Dean shouted to the back room, like he always did. Sam didn't answer, like he always didn't.

Dean didn't bother checking on Sam; the bedroom door was probably locked. Because you know, it didn't matter what got into the rest of the house so long as it didn't brother Sam or anything. "You're turning into a really bitchy thirteen year old, you know that?"

"Watch me at seventeen" Sam shouted back, finally. So he was fine after all. He hadn't been abducted or brutally slaughtered or whatever else was just _bound_ to happen to them, even if it didn't happen in this building to anyone else for a hundred years. It wasn't neurosis. It was practiced truth! Dean had a list of instances a mile long that could prove it.

Dean gave up on Sam, who sounded like he obviously wasn't coming out any time soon. There was a plastic knife in the sink, jelly-covered, which meant Sam had probably learned how to fend for himself and made an entire fortress out of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or something.

Dean opened the cupboard below the sink. Gun still there. Well, at least that probably meant Sam wasn't going to shoot him. That was always a plus. It's a good day when you can rule out fratricide on your Friday evening. God. Dean wished his internal monologue would just shut up sometimes. He was an asshole.

He turned to the fridge next, and inspected the insides. The jelly was half gone, the bread was nowhere to be seen. There wasn't much of anything else in there anymore. Which probably meant it was time to go make nice with the lady at Denis's who was or was not Denise. There was a drawer filled with three peanut butter sandwiches labeled, "Here." See, that's what happens when you actually hav a conscience, Dean thought. You make food for your brother anyway. Not like he ever did that or anything. He took one of the sandwiches out of the fridge and unwrapped it from its cocoon of napkins.

He opened it up and checked inside. It's not like he really figured Sam for that kind of brilliance, but somehow Sam always sprung stuff like that on him when he was least expecting it. And Dean figured that caution wasn't too bad if it was going to let him avoid any possible spider-eating altercations. 

The sandwich was clean.

"Aw, Sammy," said Dean. He smiled at the sandwich. He brought it to his mouth, but he couldn't bring himself to bite down. It just seemed like a lot of work all of the sudden. That whole chewing thing. The digesting thing, even. He wrapped it back up, though the finished result was far from Sam's work--but it had been practically a sandiwch with _hospital corners_ the way Sam had done it. Maybe he'd just pass out on the living room floor or something. That actually sounded pretty good.

He turned out of the kitchen, turned back to close the refrigerator, which he'd left open and drafting the entire kitchen with its frosty air, and stopped before he crossed the threshold. Sam's family tree project. It didn't look quite right, somehow. B-?

Dean flipped past the title page, grade emblazoned on it like a shameful insult. B- was pretty okay in Dean's book, but he knew it wasn't in Sam's. Maybe that's what he was so fucking sore about. Someone had finally called him out on all the bullshit he was feeding them. Well, it had been fun while it lasted. Given Mrs. Pokhart's reaction to Dean's missing masterpiece, maybe it was a sign of the times.

Dean forgot about anyone's B-, or Mrs. Pokhart, or anything, when he saw Sam's tree. It was pretty. It was very precise. The tree looked familiar, the way Sam had drawn it, though Dean couldn't exactly place where he'd seen it before. But all the other shit around the tree was the really interesting part--the part Dean _definitely_ hadn't seen before.

All those relatives. Those names. Those dates. (How could Sam have known those dates? Dean could track Mom's birthday across calendars judging by Dad's alcohol intake that last couple weeks every April, and her death across ever November, just before Thanksgiving, when the dams really broke. But how could Sam have known? He couldn't have put that together...could he? How could he?)

They looked real.

Samuel and Deanna Campbell. Samuel and Deanna--cute. Real fucking cute. Lawrence, Kansas. Some names Dean doesn't recognize at all, with military designations just like Dad. They were long gone. 70s gone. Dustin fucking Campbell, who Dean felt like he knew already, though he didn't really. Dean was kind of sore that Sam had included this Dustin guy on such a large damn tree branch for this. It had all kinds of little twiggy outgrowths labeled by gender, though all but one were nameless. One was a Kristen, who'd been a state-level gymnast, and then a national-level dancer. That seemed a little extreme, maybe even an embellishment on Sam's part, but it's not like that could break pattern. There was just--there was no way. There was no way this was all real. But Dean doesn’t know what the hell else it could be--Sam's imagination is a lot better than this. There are almost no dates--a fact Sam's teacher marked in accusatory red circles below every name.

Name?

Birthday?

Name?

Birthday?

Like it fucking mattered. They'd all had multiple names and birthdays throughout their travels, and their real ones didn't tend to be met with an overabundance of celebration (unless it involved someone drinking himself under the table, though that's usually Dad and not on any calendar that involves birthdays not Mom's, and when it's Dean it isn't related to birthdays at all). What Dean was finding really interesting was all the lines. The sheer volume of this fucking tree, with him and Sam right in the damn middle.

Dean dropped the project and rushed down the hallway. "What did you do?" he shouted, as he banged on the door. "What the hell did you tell her? What did you do?" Fury. He was furious at Sam. Again. Fuck, again. He didn't know why. It just felt like--it felt like that big damn tree was one hundred percent betrayal. Sam had no right to poke around those things. Not without Dad's say so. And no matter what kind of project he had, he had no right to parade their family tree around to some stranger like that! All those dates, those names, those years--he didn't have a right. He didn't.

But he'd been the one who said it was just a tree. That it didn't matter. So what was he getting so worked up about? It didn't make any sense. It didn't make any sense, even to him. All Dean could feel was the fury, though--welling up like some kind of unconscious monster. He wanted to bang down the door and shove Sam of the fire escape or something. Eight floors.

(Eight branches. Twenty-four branches. Look at all of those lines, all of that truth, spelled out on paper for the entire world to see. Their family tree looked like death. It looked like death and that wasn't something some random stupid English teacher had any right to see.)

But what chafed Dean the most wasn't even that. Sure, it was a massive betrayal on Sam's part, but once the tree was shown and made and graded, what's done was done. Fuck all. The thing that lived on, though--it was like the tree, now sown, had its own power. Because all Dean could see when he looked at it was, smeared over all that finely-penned truth, all that pretty shading and whatever else Sam had done to make it pretty and presentable, Dean knew it was a lie.

Because if that was their tree, the entire damn thing had burned a long time ago. That was dead to them. All they had was each other. All he had was Dad and Sam.

He took a lighter to Sam’s tree, the way he should have burned his own stupid report.

What do you want to be?

What will you be, when you grow up?

What will your family look like?

All he had was Dad and Sam.

That night, he traded sleep for the memory of fire. He stared at the popcorn ceiling and imagined floes of cold red floating through the blackness, flames reaching through space and time.

He paced circles around their apartment, checked the gun in the kitchen. Thought about homework, the sheer insurmountability of it. He’d never catch up, that much he knew. Didn’t see why he should bother trying, that being the case. He recited the names of invisible things, and the items that could kill them. Fuck invisible things that could kill _you_ ; he was gonna fight back. (Veterinarians study just bacteriology bacteriology bacteriology.) Sleep was an invisible thing, but it usually didn’t kill you.

He didn’t doubt that lack of it would do the trick--and fast.

He waited for sleep so long he wanted to cry, but it never ever came.

Sam, sprightly bright-eyed well-rested Sam, found him propped against the living room wall, below the overhanging kitchen counter. He was too far away, too blearily warped and muddied for Dean to discern his exact expression. But he said he was sorry--for what, Dean couldn’t even remember. Oh right, for family. For his family tree. But why had he been angry?

Dean didn’t catch all the words, but he was pretty sure Sam wanted to know if he could _get_ Dean anything. If he could _do_ anything for him. And the whole enterprise just smacked a little to much with pity, crazy amounts of pity. There was a “fuck off, Sam” involved at some point. He felt like he was gonna throw up. Not a good month for his stomach, that was for damn sure. He rocked back against the wall.

Sam disappeared.

Sam returned with an orange bottle. He placed it in front of Dean carefully, and disappeared again. Dean could hear him getting ready for school. He could hear him breathing on bread, and sinking a knife into jelly. Another whole tower of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. 

He looked at Sam’s present. Prescription for John Bonham--Dad’s, then. Promethazine hydrochloride. Dean didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to be for, or what Sam thought was wrong with him, but he thought about knocking back the entire bottle. For five entire minutes, the whole idea was fantastically appealing. And it would, after all, be the Winchester way. Nothing in moderation.

But he set them aside, and took none. He started at the popcorn ceiling. It was just white this time; there wasn’t even the protracted memory of fire.

“Are you coming?” Sam asked. When Dean didn’t respond at first, didn’t meet his eyes, he could hear Sam start to fidget. Shoes on carpet. Fingers through the pages of his textbooks. A worried, “Dean--”

“I’ll catch up later,” Dean mumbled, though he didn’t think he ever would. He’d just keep chasing and chasing as his own damn life passed him by. Fuck. For a split second he thought that maybe Sam should know. Maybe he should tell him.

Then Sam says, “I don’t want to be late,” and the split second deadens, falls like ash.

“So get out of here already. Fuck, Sam.”

Dean buried his head in his arms, and the door slammed, and Sam went.

\--

The last thing Sam expected to find on his way home from school was Graciela. Graciela crying. Graciela crying, and Dad, waiting for her to stop. Papi’s Dog yowled at the kitchen door, throaty and whining in turns.

Neither Dad nor Graciela acknowledged him directly, but the details slowly sifted down: Veronica Caceres was missing. She’d been missing for two days now.

Two days ago, Veronica Caceres had been helping Sam with his family tree. Now she was gone.

She was gone.

She was gone, and Dad didn’t know what took her. Didn’t know where to find her. Didn’t think he would. Not alone--and without her, he was alone. (Sam noticed he didn’t count his sons. But he was not surprised.)

Veronica was gone. “Why didn’t you tell us? It’s been two days, why didn’t you tell us--I went to _school_ today, because I--”

She was gone. Sam didn’t know what to do, or what to think past that point. Most everything he knew of Veronica came from Graciela’s face, at this moment.

It didn’t even seem possible. They’d been _safe_. They’d done some research, sure, but nothing big. No one got hurt. He and Dean had tagged along with Graciela in her fairytale of school and Key Club and old bridges way up north. Insulated by reality from--whatever nightmare made up the Winchester reality instead. And now Graciela’s too.

Veronica was gone. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Sam repeated, the first line of a recording in two parts.

Why didn’t you tell us  
Veronica was missing?

What didn’t you tell us?

“Been busy, Sam,” Dad said, as though that were a valid excuse. “Where’s your brother?”

Sam actually didn’t know. Falling apart in the living room was his best guess, though by now Dean could be anywhere.

“He’s busy,” Sam said, stared Dad down with all the defiance he could muster. (She’s gone she’s gone she’s gone and _he didn’t tell any of us_ ). Then he looked to Graciela. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.

 

That night, Sam wouldn’t have traded Dean places for anything. Dad came home.

\--

♦ _entonces mataremos al hombre que hace esto, ¿qué te parece?_ ♦

\--

Out of the haven of pillows and couch blankets. Bright white sunlight fell from the window in slats where the blinds didn’t quite meet. Alternating warmth and cold on his legs as he stumbled into the hallway, stiffly made his way to the bathroom.

“Morning.”

Lisa was white women’s briefs and a white camisole and a white bra underneath. Lisa was not nearly enough clothing to be someone else’s wife this early in the morning.

“Did you sleep okay?”

On a good night, Dean’s been averaging a very solid 2.5. He figured however many twenty minute snatches added up to somewhere near ‘okay.’ He nodded. The movement left a halo of feeling around his head, places where his head now was and where it once had been coalescing into some kind of generalized idea of existence.

Water from the tap. Everything ached and nothing worked. Fuck.

“You’re sure?” Lisa said, in the tone that meant she was sure he wasn’t. She put a hand to his back, skated over the plane of tight skin and hard knots that was apparently still a part of him when it wanted to be. He felt like one of those plastic dolls with detachable parts. He just needed to line up all his arms and legs, fit them to sockets, unscrew his head, and he’d be good to go.

“--need to call Sam,” Dean rasped, and cleared his throat. He detached his palms from the bathroom counter, straightened.

“You know, Mark--”

“I know.” Mark was exactly why this whole naked (practically naked) bathroom routine thing wasn’t gonna fly. Dean was a lot of things he wished he wasn’t, but he wasn’t going to be the asshole who broke someone’s good thing coming. Not anymore. “He moving in again? ‘Cause I can leave. Crash with Sam a while.”

“--he’s a doctor,” Lisa finished. “I could-- I don’t know. He could, you know. And Jesus, Dean, you can stay here as long as you want. You know that.”

Dean knew that too damn well.

“He knows who you are.”

Dean exhaled, laughed, something in between the two. _Great, maybe he can explain that one to me._

“Here.” Lisa had a bottle in her hand.

“Everybody’s trying to give me pills.”

“It’s Tylenol.”

Dean dry-swallowed a handful. Lisa stood in front of him, arms crossed, concern weighting down her shoulders. Wearing nothing put her wedding band and her underwear. Dean let his eyes shut. Reason number five hundred he didn’t think his sense of shame, however stunted, would let him strip down and let her ex-husband-now-boyfriend-doctor-extraordinaire Mark get all handsy. He wasn’t ready to be that pathetic.

“You were going to call Sam,” Lisa reminded him, when time snagged, and actual movement fell from the To Do list. Then she ducked back into her bedroom across the hall, into the blue sheets and white pillows of her large, large bed.

 _Fuck._ Right, Sam.

Phone.

More water from the tap.

Eyelids dripping, nose cold-red. Automatic dial tone. Fast Four was worse than Five, but better than nothing. “Hey, I got you a place.”

“Dean?”

“Who else would it be? Caller ID, dude.”

“Sorry. New SIM card.”

“What’d you do to the old one?”

“How’d you get a place?”

“Called in a favor with Barb--Lisa’s sister, Barb. It’s in Evansville, you can move in on Monday.”

“Oh, I see. So it’s not asking favors off of Lisa you have a problem with. You’d just rather ask for me than for yourself.”

Dean faltered. Looked back toward the bedroom. Lisa looked up from the book she’d pulled from the bedside table. He winked at her, retreated from the bathroom and back down the hall toward the couch. “I’m full up on asking favors off of people, okay?” he whispered furiously. “I’ve got my ass in so many charity dishes I think I’m starting to lose my--”

“And you still want to borrow my car.”

“You don’t count. And there’s still a woman in white, you know, killing people. Because no one’s hauling ass to California and hunting the bitch down.”

“And there’s earthquakes killing thousands. Are you going to hunt those, too?”

“You remember what ‘supernatural’ means, right?”

Hell is over, Dean, Sam sighed. Then he said some bullshit like, Hell is over and Heaven is gone and this is what we have, right here. You can’t help ghosts.

Which was all true. Dean knew it was. But he also knew this:

_We used to._

“Whatever, Sammy. I got you the apartment, nice little place at the end. I have--well, I had--savings. I know how to do my job. Go be happy.”

“Dean, I just want you t--” Dean hung up.

Whiskey. Dean turned toward the microwave, watched 9:43 flash luminescent green. Fifteen more hours to waste before it was time to go back to bed, try the whole thing over again.

“What is your job?” Lisa asked. She was dressed now, red polo and blue jeans. She poured him a glass of orange juice to compete with his flask.

“You know. The telemarketing thing,” Dean muttered.

“I know better than that. There’s something in California; I heard you. But finding a place for Sam--that’s not either.” Grape-nuts. Grape-nuts poured into a bowl. All the food in the world, and Lisa’s idea of breakfast had to be granola and grape-nuts.

“What can I say? I love giving back.”

Lisa offered him a spoon, which Dean waved down. “Nah, I’m not--”

“I’m not saying it’s wrong. I was just wondering--what do you think your job is?”

They stopped talking. Dean drank. Lisa ate. The clock ticked down, not anywhere close to fast enough.

“When’s class?” Dean asked finally, as he rolled the edge of his glass on the kitchen counter, watched the pulp skate around the inner perimeter. He tried to roll his shoulders; he felt closed in, cramped, like he’d been shoved into a refrigerator box, head first.

“Eleven. I have some appointments in the evening, usual house call run, but I’m free otherwise. You wanna do something?”

Box. Box tight around his shoulders. Tightening. “No, I’m good. Isn’t”--box box box--“Mark supposed to be coming over?” There was a snake writhing in his stomach that suddenly made whiskey, orange juice, and Tylenol seem like bad ideas individually--never mind their combination.

Like if he opened his mouth too wide, the snake would stick its head out, and it’d all be over. He caught the tail end of, “--watch the game, but I can tell him today’s not a good--”

“How’s class? Do you--do you like--” Deep breath.

Lisa poured him a glass of water, slid it across the counter with deliberate calm. “Class is good,” she said slowly. “I mean. I’m pretty sure there was a reason I didn’t just go to college after high school. I don’t think I’d have been able to concent--”

Concentrate.

“And Ben? Ben’s uh--he’s--”

“A freshman. Indiana State. He’s going to be pre-vet.”

Dean sputtered, choked his water pack up. Tried the whole swallowing thing again.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just thinking about--it’s nothing. Pre-- Pre-vet, huh.”

“Exotic animals, he says.” And Lisa laughed. “Though I’d rather he just do like, dogs, you know? I think he’s still trying to be you.”

Dogs. Dean laughed. “Yeah, uh. Yeah. Dogs.”

Lisa poured him another glass of water. No ice. Dean was sure he’d find a scrutinizing expression on her face if he looked up. He didn’t look. If he stared as his cup hard enough he could see flecks of dust on the surface of the water. He blinked.

The snake was crawling up his diaphragm. His neck ached. (Breathe.)

“The woman Sam is staying with. Who is she? Is she a friend?” Lisa asked, when Dean stopped holding up his end of the--conversation, or whatever the hell they were having right now.

Box. Snake. Dogs. Heat at his neck. Leg. He needed to--he needed to get up, or stand, or something. “No, no she’s not. She kidnapped our dad, and she _mind_ raped Sammy on their first date, and--she crippled Bobby, fed--fed our friends to her big black dogs. And I think she--”

She was what was left. She was left over. She was--

“I don’t know. Blacklist ain’t an exclusive party. Sometimes you just have to get over it, or something.”

“Those...aren’t things you’re expected to just get over.’”

But you did. You had to. Otherwise you couldn’t face y-- 

Fuck. The box was now the size of this throat. The snake was the size of his chest cavity. His breaths were non-existent. The stool was a hot plate. Dean all but leapt from his seat, landed passably, if lopsidedly. “I’m gonna make a few calls.”

“Dean,” said Lisa. And Dean looked up. Her lips were flatlined, jaw set, hands wrung. Worried. “I need to know: If I leave you alone, are you gonna be okay?”

Dean was pretty sure he didn’t look the part, sure as hell didn’t feel it, but he said, “Always.” All he needed was-- Out. He needed to get out.

“Okay.” Which was trust Dean didn’t deserve, and Lisa knew it. But Dean figured he’d been falling apart for over forty years; one afternoon of more of the same wasn’t going to kill anyone.

One day, Lisa would get sick of peeling away layers. Her eternal patience would be swallowed by Dean’s apparent lust for more-eternal agony. He knew the road; he could tell it hundreds of miles off, but he didn’t know how to stop it. He didn’t think he could.

Which, fuck, was fine by him. He was tired of having layers anyway.

Let the end come.

It was cool in the garage. Lisa’s Civic needed a wash. He paced a furious circuit around the perimeter and between the cars--figure eight. His heart popped. Crackled, even. Somewhere between the hood of the Civic and the Impala’s front door-- _pull the tarp off you can do it. You’ve done it before you can do it now you can do it right now_ \--the bottom of his box dropped out and his insides plummeted. He didn’t hear them smack concrete, litter the garage floor, so they must have kept right on going. Down where? Down where he’d never find them, that’s for damn sure.

(All under heaven.)

Calls. He should make calls. Where to start.

He checked the list of calls the agency had e-mailed him. Bullshit, lies, more lies. Awesome. “Progress of the future,” he muttered. Telemarketing just kept getting stupider.

911 was probably a good starting place. Three digits, nice and manageable. That and Dean was now positive he’d finally gone out of his fucking mind. It was about time, but still. This blew.

Dean blew out air, like the world was a balloon. The world was a balloon closing in.

_Don’t be overdramatic, Winchester. Just pick a goddamn number and call._

He looked at the list again. Some pharm company was trying to sell meds with a shelf name Dean couldn’t even imagine pronouncing. Depression. Anxiety. Panic disorder.

Well _fuck_ that. It wasn’t a crime to need your job, but this one was fucking stupid. Fuck it. Fuck it fuck it.

He gave this garage circuit another pass. His heart raced. Pain, when it registered, was welcome. Was an anchor. He was snakes and boxes and his heart was--he swore it was--Snap, Crackle, and Pop all in one. But pain was pain. Shoulder, hip, knee. Grounding wires through his joints, his knee, through his foot.

He grabbed the Impala’s shroud and jerked it away so sharply the edge smacked him in the face and stung, then burned.

Hands. Hands along her frame, her top, her window. _Oh, baby._

Engine turning over. No rumble. Dead in the water. He fixed her.

He would always fix her. But he knew his car, and he knew when she was done.

She was done.

The idea seized him by the throat and squeezed. Lights out. The snake, suffocating right alongside Dean, thrashed inside him. Razor blade tail. Razor blades.

Cool metal. “Come on, baby.” He pressed his forehead to the roof of his car. “Come on.”

Razor blades. He couldn’t--

(deep breath)

He couldn’t-- He couldn’t. His heart was a bubbling disaster. His neck ached. Hot breath at his nape. Hellhounds. (But where was Meg? Meg was in South Dakota. Meg was a bitch. Meg was Hell’s bitch, and her ghost was following him. To the end of Hell and further. Wait, Meg? Seriously, Meg?

 _Sam._ )

Sam. Sam and his goddamn empty new SIM card. Phone. Automatic dial tone. Ringing. Dizzying ringing. “Sam--” Deep breath. The phone was still ringing. “Sam, please--” Still ringing.

_”Sam.”_

“Dean?”

“Sam, I--”

 

I need help.


	4. Chapter 4

♦ PART THREE ♦

"You need anything?" Sam asked, the night of his fourteenth birthday. San Diego May had been 85 when they drove in, was 60 now. They’d been out of gas but now were out of money. No motel tonight.

Dean didn't answer immediately. He was sewing stitches across his knee. He squinted in the bare white of the gas station phosphorescence. The suture thread kept sticking to his fingers, sticky with blood. "More light."

"I can't do better than a floodlight, Dean." Sam sighed. "Do you want anything to eat? I'm going to Denis's. You know, the shop across from that apartment we had here last year. With the pink roof."

"Don't have any cas--" Dean stifled a yelp as he pulled the thread through. "--sssh _it_."

"I got that covered. And, uh--do you want any Tylenol or something? I think we're kinda out of the good stuff."

Dean exhaled sharply as he came back around for another stitch. "Nah, just the whiskey's good. Get it out of the trunk?"

Sam did, and Sam left. Denis's was blocks away, if memory served, but the streets were empty, and the traffic was lean. He wove through a hodgepodge of industrial yards with small yardless houses perched between them, new homes built in tracts. Last year they'd just been signs promising houses. Sam saw two men smoking on the front porch of one of them. In the windows of others, people arguing. So they must really be homes now.

Denis's was settled on the commercial-residential gap, part of a smattering of small shops and groceries that sold anything from kimchee to scrapbooking materials. Before he turned inside, Sam looked up and up and up to the eighth floor of their old place at the end of the street. He couldn't see their apartment exactly, nestled as it was in the middle of the building, but he wondered who was living there now. If they kept a gun in their scrub brushes, if they noticed the carvings Dean had made under the carpet, above the door. They'd sanded them down before they left, but they never went away. Not entirely.

"Buenos noches," Sam said to the woman at the counter, and exhausted half the Spanish he even thought he knew. But the woman smiled, so Sam figured it had been worth something. "What do you have for birthdays?" he asked, as he bent to peruse the insides of the glass cases.

The woman didn't answer him. She'd dropped her smile. Now she was just waiting. Sam recognized the flan, dulce de leche, sweet delicious things now partially sunken under their own weight. Plain fat buns sold three to a bag for three dollars--'teleras'. Sam sighed. That was probably more their style. "I'll take these," he said.

 "Three," said the woman, and Sam gave her three.

Sam unwrapped the first telera on his way back to the gas station. He hoped Dean hadn't driven off without him. Sam didn't think he'd do it on purpose, but you never knew. Dean's focus had been kind of fish-eyed ever since they’d hit the county line. With this in mind, Sam stepped up the pace.

The first telera tasted like anticlimax.

Dean was where Sam had left him, asleep in the front seat until Sam tapped on the window. Then Dean jumped, wild-alert, with his heart in his eyes. Seeing Sam, he wiped a hand down his face, kneaded the bridge of his nose with his still-bloody knuckles.

 _Unlock the door!_ Sam mouthed.

"Jesus, Sam. You scared the-- don't do that!" Sam could see Dean's chest heave as he spoke, too much adrenaline running through his everything.

"Sorry. Here. It's bread."

 "I can see that. And no, Sam, we need to get outta here," Dean objected when Sam started rounding the front of the car. Telera in hand, Dean struggled out of the front seat. The knee he'd been working on was stiff and crooked as he limped around the car and took the door Sam had opened for himself. "You need to drive."

Sam closed the door. "But it's the city, Dean. Everyone will notice. Do I look sixteen to you?"

"It's all about the lighting. Come on, let's go."

They went.

They crossed old familiar roads, hilly strips of asphalt crumbled with age. Intersections with a patchwork of lights, knit close the way only the big cities were. The boldly colored billboards filling the skyline still promised everything.  
 "Do you remember the place at the end?" Sam asked, as they waited for a light behind a large white truck.

"What?" Dean was slumped against the window, looking out at the taillights in the next lane.

"The apartment we had here. You always called it that."

"Oh. _Veronica's_ apartment."

"It was ours, too."

 "Don't get nostalgic on me, Sammy. It's only been a year. Besides, there's nothing to be nostalgic about. Turn left."

Dean led them to Veronica's house. The rose bushes were bare now, dark twigs against the little house, which looked as though it was standing interrogation under the streetlights. The sidewalk still read GC 1983. The door was locked.

Sam looked up at Dean. "Time ya."

Dean frowned. "Whatever." He stepped back, kicked the door in. He reeled with the effort, grabbed at the knee with the stitches. If Sam hadn't caught it, the door would have hit him on the recoil.

"What kind of genius plan was that?"

"Faster," Dean pointed out.  

"You've shaved four minutes off our day. Congratulations."

The house was empty. Not that Sam had expected anything more. The big tan computer in the back, piano decked with dolls and photos in frames, kitchen stuffed in unmatching chairs and foods Sam didn't know--these were all gone. Without them, it was just an empty building, like so many places they'd left before.

"Do you think you're ever going to go back to school?" Sam asked. He wasn't sure why he did; it was just the first thing that came to mind. He felt like he had to fill the room with something, anything at all, or it was going to swallow them whole.

"'Cause I did such a bang-up job the first time? I don't think so." Dean sat down against one of the walls and thumbed at his stitches. "Dad said there was some kind of test I could take instead. Figure I'll do that."

"But you could graduate, if you tried." Sam was thinking about college. He only had the vaguest notion of what it was, what it meant, but all the schools, and all the teachers--they were all speaking college, college, college. And Dean was talking about a test.

Dean shrugged. "Not anymore. I have to--"

"You don't have to do anything," Sam interrupted. "Look around you. Who's watching?"

"I am. Go get the salt." When Sam didn't move, Dean didn't bother repeating himself. He got up and limped down the steps, out to the car. Rock salt and weaponry. Sam watched as he stumbled through the darkened house, salting the doors and windows.

"You shouldn't keep walking on that. You'll pull the stitches."

"Well, thanks for the help, Sam."

"And you should be icing it. One of these days you're gonna screw it up for good."

"Again, Sam, thanks--"

"I would've got you ice if you'd asked me."

Dean folded his hands into the sleeves of his coat and crossed his arms. Tried to get as comfortable as possible on the living room floor. "I'm tired of asking you for things."

Never mind that he'd just asked Sam to salt the building. --Told. He'd told Sam. And maybe that was the difference.

After San Diego, Sam had joined a soccer team, played with them all summer. He'd been good. He only missed one tournament, and it was to hunt a nest of vampires. They'd wanted him back for the fall, and Dad had almost let him go. But soccer was money they didn't have and a tether they couldn't honor. That summer, Dean would have flunked out of his junior year if he'd attended enough classes to earn any grade. He took Incompletes in all subjects, like the year hadn't even existed, and dropped off the map.

He was part of the statistic Sam's teachers assured him he didn't want to be. More importantly, Dean was living out what seemed more like a sentence than a lifetime. And if it was a life, it was going to be a short one.

"The staring at me thing is kind of creeping me out, dude. You look like you're going to eat me."

Sam started. "I do not!" But he joined Dean on the floor, tried to arrange himself into a position that was comfortable and not too pathetic-looking. Dean jostled a boot at him, told him to find his own corner. He'd called dibs on this one. Because Dean was seven.

"I'm going to kick you if you don't go find your own spot. The entire house is empty, what the hell."

"No you're not," Sam retorted. "And you wanna know why? Because you didn't go get ice, so your stupid knee is probably too swollen to even move right now." Sam wanted to stick out his tongue, but he was older than seven. He had something called impulse control.

"Bitch."

"Jerk."

"Stop talking, I'm trying to sleep." 

Dean could try, but Sam knew that whether he kept talking or not, Dean wasn't going to. Not the whole night through. He hadn't managed that in a long time. He took his days double time, and with every passing night, Sam swore he put a year between them. The thought made Sam reluctant to ever close his eyes. Maybe if he didn't need to sleep, he could keep the Dean he knew.

But Sam slept. And he dreamed them playing cards. They each had their hands, and they stacked the cards between them, one after the other. They built a wall. They built a wall made out of soccer balls and Winchester rifles and gauze and cleats and suture thread.

When he woke, Dean was on the phone. They'd acquired another one last March, when Dad stopped chaperoning them through entire cases. He'd work some while they researched, find new ones while they dug graves. Do whatever else he did when he disappeared, empty promises in his wake.

"Dad's at Graciela's new place," said Dean. "With her aunt or something, I dunno. But she won't talk to him. We need to go."

Sam didn't know what time it was, but he hazarded a wild guess. "It's three in the morning."

"It's four," said Dean. "Come on." Dean's limp was more pronounced now, stiff with cold, swelling, and overuse. Sam hadn't moved until Dean was well past the threshold of the front door--until he was sure Dean wasn't turning back--and Sam still beat him to the car.

Sam drove. Dean slept. Dean woke. Dean tried to sleep again.

Sam drove.

This was the first time they'd ever come back to old stomping grounds. But it was the first time Sam had ever really been aware of their failures, so maybe that was why. They weren't supposed to ruin things. They were supposed to help.

But the house was empty, the city had taken no notice, and someone had to.

Or maybe it was just the chupacabra they'd hit in Santee, and it wasn't about memorials at all. That did seem more their style. All Sam knew was they'd helped ruin something good, and it had torn them apart.

"I don't want it to happen again," Sam said suddenly, as arcs of bright headlight streaked across the windshield.

Dean was asleep.

"Because now I'm losing you."

\--

Veronica's body will never be found. 

Dad was gone by the time they'd got there; apparently he'd left right after he'd called them. Graciela sat beside her aunt and didn't look at them. She was still round, and dark, and pretty. Her hair was longer. She'd been in an out of a hospital, and she had the bracelet to prove it. They were helping her there. She'd made a lot of progress in group so far, said her aunt--call me Tia Melissa, she'd added--but that didn't mean a hell of a lot to Dean. Sure, he'd seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but Graciela wasn't Jack Nicholson.

Veronica's body would never be found, and Dean couldn't understand why the hell that didn't seem to mean anything to Sam. Dean couldn't understand why, and he didn't know how, but he was losing his brother.

The door had barely shut behind them when Dean said, "You're missing the bigger picture, here, Sam."

Sam didn't dignify the argument with a response.

"You said you didn't want it to happen again. Well newsflash, Sam--it happens. And it's gonna keep happening. And it sucks. That's not why we do things. I _know_ it's gonna happen again. It'll probably be our fault."

Sam kept walking toward the Impala, arrow straight.

"The dozen times it doesn't--"

"Just stop talking, Dean."

"This is how I--how _we_ \--"

"Notice how 'this' hasn't actually solved any of your problems." Sam got in the driver's seat and slammed the door behind him.

Dean shouted. _Stop fucking with my car, get out 'cause I'm driving, fuck off Sam_ \--the list didn't end; it just recirculated.

 "Let me know when you sleep through the night--just once. Let me know when you stop freaking out every time someone taps you on the shoulder. When you're actually _happy_ ," Sam hissed though the window, which was open just a sliver.

This was ridiculous. "I _am_ happy. I'm always happy. Except right now, 'cause I'm pissed, and I'm about to hit you."

"I can take you."

Fury. Fury so hot it stuck, twisted like burn scars inside him. Dean did his best to swallow it anyway. "You really wanna have this fight?"

Sam kicked the car door wide open, so quickly Dean didn't even see it coming. It caught him in the knees first. Dean felt something jarring and bone-deep. It might have been pain, but hell, it could have been anything.

The next thing he knew, he was supine on the concrete, feeling the fog wet seep into his pants. Condensation dripped onto his stomach from the car door, sharp and deadly black above him. Forget feeling agony--his legs from the knee down where _made_ of it. His curses fell to the back of his throat, and he just moaned.

Sam stepped out of the car and over him. He looked appropriately stricken. "Oh my god, Dean, I didn't mean to--"

Like hell he didn't. Dean twisted onto his hands and stomach, pushed up. He clung to the Impala. When he had enough breath: "Yeah, whatever."

Sam had known exactly what he was doing. He just hadn't thought it through. That whole Big Picture thing.

"What exactly do you think the big picture is?" Sam was incredulous.

Dean hadn't realized he'd been talking out loud. Sam helped him around to the other side of the car, but he didn't open the door. He actually wanted a response. "I can't just--"

"Papi's Dog is dead."

They both turned. Graciela stood before them. "Papi's Dog is dead. So she's gone now, too."

"I'm sorry," said Sam.

 _That is._ Dean nodded towards Graciela, without breaking eye contact. _That's the big picture._ But Dean wasn't even sure if he meant 'people' or 'failure.'

It wasn't a question, where they would go. What they would do. Dean supervised as Sam bent under one hundred pounds of limp black dog and carried it to the trunk of the car, and wrapped her in the shroud they kept--dark green instead of black, now moth-eaten and everything else imperfect.

Graciela took shotgun.

"How's your knee?" Sam asked him, as he crawled into the backseat.

"It feels like someone threw a car door at it. Hand me the whiskey, will you? Should be in the glove box; never put it back in the trunk."

Sam frowned. "Is this going to be a problem?"

Dean snorted. "Please. I know what I'm doing."

They drove the long highways, black at first and then white grey in the fog that swept from the west, and the sunlight from the east. Dean skated in and out of sleep, but in his waking moments Graciela didn't say a word. It was liking driving with a ghost. She didn't tell any stories about games her dad had played on the bridge or about how much her dad had loved her mother. It was just a highway, just a bridge.

By the time they got there, it was six o'clock again. Dean watched from the car as Sam and Graciela hauled the dog across the freeway, dumped her unceremoniously beneath the white bridge skeleton, in the tall brown rushes that swallowed the both of them whole. 

It was just a bridge.

And see, that was what Dean meant about the bigger picture. He had no illusions. It wasn't some symbolic crusade--save everyone, save the world, whatever. He didn't think the world was going to be ending any time soon; they wouldn't need to bother saving it. And if it did, it'd die slow and sick and wretched, and then there would be no saving it.

It wasn't about what you deserved or what any other poor bastard deserved; it was about what you didn't. It was about what you still had, and what you made of that. Dean knew what was out there in the dark. And he was going to kill as many evil sons of bitches as he could, because maybe, maybe, it'd make up the difference.

He watched Graciela throw her cross to the ground outside Tia Melissa's house, watched catatonic indifference bleed into hurt, and anger, and he knew.

The big picture was pulling the trigger and knowing that you were as close to winning as anyone was ever going to get. When you were alone, and desperate, that was all you needed.

And that was all Dean needed.

\--

♦ _¿te fijas cómo el viento previene a los que escuchamos?_ ♦

\--

Empty house.

It always ended in an empty house.

Dean slept fitfully, but slept. Miracles, since Sam’s version of a makeshift bed was to spread a scratchy wool blanket he’d found in the trunk of his car across Bobby’s kitchen floor. Sam sat beside him cross-legged and waited.

The emptiness crept around him, in between Meg’s invisible hounds. (Those did not creep, but they skulked.)

The emptiness was louder.

Trying to get all that shit out and away, it was amazing what Sam had found. It was like the house was built out of cubic feet of memories, and not all good. But not all bad (or so he'd been trained to believe). 

Sam was willing to believe in a lot of things. But right now, Sam mostly believed that the whole world could fit within the walls of this one house. The crooked two-story that rocked, that had steel plating on its basement door, and black magic carved into its ceiling. Nets of vervain in its chimney. This was the whole world. Because he’d seen a fair amount of it outside--all of America, one graveyard in Scotland--and contrary to popular belief, it was very small. There was a limit to what could be known, what could be had, or deserved. There was family. There was food. Bad movies. Noise some people thought was music. Bon Jovi.

Hell, after you stripped away the stories, the world could fit inside a fishbowl. Sam scratched at the ears of a Hellhound, was confronted with a muffled snorting and guttural moaning that was not entirely in opposition. The world could definitely be really fucking strange, he amended, but it was small. God knew where Meg was. Searching for the knife, probably. He didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d probably be searching forever. No one was gonna die like that. Not anymore. 

“Dean,” he said. Dean moaned. Continued to dream. Of Hell, maybe--the ghost of Hell. Or of life, or of Heaven. ‘Nightmare’ was too generalized for Sam to properly know.

“Dean, wake up.” And he shook him.

Dean woke to pain, that much Sam could see. Would probably always wake to pain, because Dean was an idiot, and would always be one, and Sam would always be around to tell him so. And that pretty much assured that Dean would deny it forever. But whatever; Sam could accept that. Maybe.

“You can borrow the car if you want.”

 _What?_ Dean rasped blearily. He jolted upright, like he’d just realized he’d been lying down. He winced, rubbed at this shoulder. _Goddamn._

“You can borrow the car. You can go to California. You can hunt your woman in white. Go be happy.”

“What?” Dean repeated. He looked around. Blanket on hard ground. Bobby’s ceiling above him. “Well, no wonder.” His face pinched. “Did you--give me? I feel kinda--”

“That’s called sleep,” Sam said. “You should try it on your own sometime.”

“Yeah, and fuck you too.” Dean shifted into as comfortable a position as he could manage.

“I want to show you this,” Sam said, and drew Ruby’s knife. It was snapped at the hilt.

Dean eyed him quizzically. “Is Meg--?”

“Meg’s fine.” She’s as fine as she’ll ever be. “I went to Wyoming to hunt something.”

Rage, at first. Then subsided rage. Then tiredness. “What was it.”

“I don’t know. Something Eve let out of purgatory. Biding its time all these years. The knife didn’t work, obviously.” Dean pitched forward and grabbed at Sam’s collar, brushed his hands down Sam’s torso. Sam stopped him. “This was weeks ago. I’m fine.”

“Why did you go?” --which really meant ‘why did you go without me?’ which wasn’t a real question. Not one Dean didn’t know the answer to.

“Because I thought it would help. It didn’t.” End of story. Sam lost his phone, gained a mild concussion, and re-sprained his bad wrist, but it didn’t matter, and it didn’t help.

“So how’d you end the thing?”

“Fire.”

“Attaboy, Sammy.”

“But it didn’t help,” Sam repeated. He wasn’t going to let Dean turn this into some kind of campfire story. “You have people who can. You have Ben, and Lisa. Hell, Lisa’s-sister-Barb. _Mark--_ ”

Dean cut him off. “First of all, Mark isn’t even a doctor. He’s a physician’s _assistant._ ”

Sam didn’t quite see the relevance.

“This is some kind of intervention, right? Go see a doctor, take something, write confessional poetry; it’ll all blow over?”

“You have people who can help.”

“Then that’s _worse_.” 

Ah, right. Dean logic. Sam waited for Dean to continue. There was something sedative about the floor, the one blanket. Bobby’s walls, his jacked up ceiling. He breathed evenly.

“It’s worse,” Dean said. And Sam waited. “Because all those people give you a goddamn free pass, a thousand free passes, and you still can’t--”

Dean rubbed at his shoulder. Sam waited.

“Before you got there, Lisa came in. She missed her class. She missed Mark. She missed her appointments. Fuck, she missed a call from Ben. She missed it all because she had to sit there in the goddamn garage and remind me to _breathe_.”

“But she didn’t mind. And she knew what to do. And she helped you.”

Dean barked. One of the Hellhounds growled. “Yeah, she knew what to do. And you wanna know why? Because it happened to Ben. After that changeling thing, it happened to him, and for a year he'd get these-- And if I hadn’t-- and that's why--

“‘And if you hadn’t’, they’d both be dead. You didn’t sic a changeling on the neighborhood, Dean. As much as I know you want to be the apple in the garden, you didn’t.”

Dean glared a _fuck you, Sam_. “And she still let me in her front door. And for fourteen years, and she didn't tell me a damn thing. I don't even know what I'm still doing there.” Whatever Dean wanted to say fizzled out, and he left it.

“It doesn’t matter how you found them,” Sam said, after he was sure Dean was done. “You have people.” Dean looked like he was about to open his mouth again, so Sam spat out his last two cents. “I don’t.”

The shadows on the floor shifted as the breeze moved the trees outside.

“I have you.”

Sam can almost hear gears turning. “I don’t know what the hell I’ve been doing. I don’t know why it turned out that way, but that’s what I have. I have you.”

Dean frowned. “So, now that you’re...alone and desperate, you want me to come boss you around.”

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“Gee, thanks, Sam.”

“But that’s why you followed Dad around, isn’t it? That’s why you came and got me at school.”

Dean looked like he was about to punch him if he didn’t keep talking, come clean about this. Not that Sam was afraid of that. He was more afraid of the words than anything else. He hadn’t thought it possible until the world came apart at the seams in his hands. And then he knew. The words were the glue. _It's okay; it's okay._ “I’m-- I don’t know where we go from here. But I know we have to go. And we can’t die, not yet. Dying is easy. We have too much practice.” Then Sam swallowed his fear, sewed it behind a wry grin. “You used to believe that, remember?”

Dean had apparently had enough of his. He groaned, made an off-balance play at rising from the ground, favoring both his left shoulder and his right leg. He pushed off from one of the boxes remaining in the skeleton of Bobby’s house. Slow but steady success. Now level, he looked at Sam, tinged pink with the sore afterward of vivid pain. When Sam offered no rebuke, no I-told-you-so, he turned his gaze to the end of the long hallway.

He knew. Sam knew he knew. There was no going back. Those stories had been told. But he and Dean--they couldn't just lurk between the pages and call that living new; that wasn’t going to cut it. Death wouldn’t either; they were of the few who could actually say they’d tried that. 

Sam could see the knowing wrapped up in choked breaths and slick muscle, caught at the back of Dean's throat. Dean fingered his shoulder tenderly and swallowed the reality he could not yet speak. But he knew.

 "What’s in this box, anyway?" he said instead. “The thing’s a rock.”

"The Winchester Gospel," Sam said plainly and without emphasis. If he offered anything more he didn't think he could say it with a straight face. Still, he tried to clarify for Dean, staring at him dumbstruck. "You know, all those Supernatural books. Chuck's life's work, key to the universe, et al."

"No, I know," Dean snapped. "It's just--" He thought for a moment, and regarded the box with a petulant frown. "Oh god, no. No. That's--"

 "Awkwardly metaphorical?"

"--awkwardly fucking stupid. This is ridiculous. We are not taking these. We're _not_." Dean's eyes quested frantically around the shade-dark room, empty and unimparting. "We're gonna burn them. We're gonna burn them, Sam. Take 'em out back and burn them. I don't give a fuck what the sheriff says; these need to go. These need--"

Sam snorted. Following the break in Dean's miniature tirade, he said, "Did you know Becky picked the series up? Ghostwriting for the publishing company."

Deep breath. "She didn't-- She doesn't--?"

"One hundred percent outside of divine intervention." 

Dean sighed relief. Then, "So what have we been doing instead?"

Sam shrugged. "Dunno. I only skimmed. More of the same, I guess?"

And then Dean looked inexplicably perturbed, offered a question in explanation. "You didn't skim through any, uh. Fiery, demonic..."

Oh.

"Yeahhhhh, I think I did. Or I might have. Maybe." The words came out in a harried flush, so quick Sam could feel the heat they left on his cheeks. "If was very heartfelt, if that helps."

Dean's mouth froze, O O O. Then: "N-- no, not really."

“I saw your notes. The page from Dad’s journal.”

“Okay,” Dean allowed. “Listen, if this confession involves anyone taking it up the a--”

“They’re all dead, huh? All those hunters.” Sam pressed on. “They’re gone.”

Silence. Then, “Yeah, they’re gone.”

“Then we’re just stories.”

A _tch_. “Yeah, I’m good. _You’re_ the one who needs a doctor. We’re people, Sam.”

“And these are ghosts.” Sam held up the file, a slim neat collection of a woman on a dark deserted highway, killing faithless passerby. Then the page from Dad’s journal. “ _They_ are ghosts.”

“They were people,” Dean insisted. “They were good--some of them were good--mostly all right--people.”

It’s just a legend, a story. A legend we happen to know is based on truth, Sam added before Dean could object. And that’s the important part. You kill the source, you kill the myth. And you have nothing.

“You _don’t_ kill the, the-- _not_ -myth, and the not-myth kills people.”

That was Dean’s bottom line: People die. 

“And some live,” Sam reminded him. They believe in the myth, and they fear it, and they live. They guide themselves by hear-tell and implication, and they live. “What does that sound like to you?”

“Yanni.”

“It’s done, Dean. It’s over. We’re done. Let her go. Let all the ghosts go.”

“Yanni,” Dean repeated, though the wisecrack was gone from his voice.

“Some of us have to live on the loose ends. Let it go.”

For a moment, Dean looked absolutely lost. Desperately, terrifyingly lost. Then he got up. Groaned. He slapped Sam on the knee. “And some of us have to live in Indiana. Up and at ‘em, Sasquatch. Time to go chase the roaches out of your new place. 

“Got you a nice corner lot, a place at the end of the street. There’s a balcony for your planter boxes, or gnome collection, or whatever. Hot water, actual legitimate rent. I didn’t skimp,” Dean assured him. _Because this is it, isn’t it. This is as far as we get_ , said Dean’s eyes, and looked to Sam for their assurance. 

Dean could say whatever he wanted, pretend to hide in whatever platitudes or fantasies he dreamed. All Sam could see behind them, all he could see in Dean, was truth. _This is the end. This is our grave. Our grave has planter boxes and rent._

This was the end.

Sam turned away. “Let’s go to California,” he said. “After we move Bobby’s stuff to the new place. Let’s go to California.”

Dean’s brow furrowed. He licked his lips as though trying to taste for sarcasm, lies.

“Let’s go to California,” Sam said again. He wasn’t even sure why he said it, he hadn’t meant to, he didn’t know what to say now that he had. He took a deep breath.

“...For the woman in wh--?”

"Wo _men_ ," Sam corrected. He could do this. He could say this. He could run with all of this. "White sand, white bathing suits." Before Dean could reply-- "And a doctor."

Dean rolled his eyes but played along. "Yeah, Doc Hollywood. That entire state, man, I--"

"Libraries."

"--Research?"

" _Pleasure reading_ ," Sam insists. "You know, I've never read Slaughterhouse Five."

Dean made an amused, alveolar sound, then jabbed his finger at Sam insistently. "Bonfires."

"--Salt?"

"S'mores." Crooked smile. “Help me with this?” And he nudged the box of books with his boot.

Sam picked it up while Dean supervised, and followed Dean out the door, to the front porch. “Trash?”

“Nah, put it in the trunk.” Dean tried to close Bobby’s door, but true to form the damn thing wouldn’t stay shut. Dean left it. “We can burn them later.”

Sam stepped off the white porch and into the rushes, grown too high without people to trample them down. The afternoon glared full into his eyes, made everything white-hot and almost invisible.

Four o'clock was leaking into his clothes, and it felt good.


End file.
